A Modest Proposal

If you really are a liberal modern globaliser, why not merge your post-nationalist global concerns with what appears to be an insistent desire to take control of healhtcare systems? Here's a Swiftian proposal.

You know all that money we waste on international aid that sustains corruption and grandiloquent follies? Redeploy it. Africa has been ravaged by diseases which are sustained because we take doctors and nurses from there to here and exploit their education. We are also fighting wars in Afghanistan against the opium that you seem to think is bad because it undermines the rational individual. We also have a crisis of medical inflation, and there are surfeits of oil production--stockpiles--building up whilst airline companies are going bust. In addition, there are private colleges and universities all over the place essentially wasting qualified talent by getting the talented to teach to government-controlled curricula for state monopolies and public employment.

Go on, put it all together.

Establish hospitals with capital written off against tax in australafrican countries, and create the tax write-off by abolishing overseas aid. Transitionally, you could feed them with the dumped product of agricultural subsidy.

Then, allow universities to accept a postgraduate year in those places as equivalent to education here, but make it a proper medical-delivery year. After that, establish an income stream for the new hospitals by flying in citizens from western healthcare system in need of safe procedures that are too expensive to provide everyone with (given all the other demands on money). Whilst they are there, ease their pain with cheap drugs from Afghan farmers.

Give the local governments tax revenue, and put the profits into an African bond market to finance commodity-backed development of infrastructure, whilst gradually training and retaining local doctors.

Use the home savings to improve domestic healthcare systems, or to lower everyone's debt; maybe even turn taxes into budget shares, with a progressive amount taken if a government is in deficit and a progressive amount given back if a budget is in surplus. I don't care.

Of course, you wouldn't do that. More likely, you'll give your Asian-backed paper money to gamblers who will lose it. Still, you can always replace it with tax subsidies misdesigned for someone else. Unless you hit lucky recycling it into a tax farm that has been outsourced from the state and geared to private profit, whilst nationalising debt.

You won't acknowledge that, whilst the world burns and defence and carbon trade con-men rip off stupid politicians, the policies you have supported are only making you and some of your friends richer, but everyone else more stressed, indebted or alienated from themselves.

Never mind; you can read about your essential righteousness in the newspapers you and your duplicitous mates hire their friends to write for, at the same time as throwing condoms, landfill, and grain at Africans and keeping them out.

Really, can't you do better?