And now from the department of history repeating itself department…

Churchill on socialized medicine that was implemented in 1948

“The queues are longer, the shelves are barer, the shops are emptier. The interference of Government Departments with daily life is more severe and more galling. More forms have to be filled up, more officials have to be consulted. Whole spheres of potential activity are frozen, rigid, and numb, because this Government has to prove its Socialistic sincerity instead of showing how they can get the country alive and on the move again.”

This is all taken from The Last Lion by William Manchester and Paul Reid. I’ve been working my way through the book for months and have really increased my progress now that I realized I can read while students are working on their assignments.

I love the fact that Churchill had a grasp on the end result of socialism. It never, in the end, provides more of something, but leads to less of something because there are more demands on it. Socializing things also weakened the work force. “A might army of 450,000 additional civil servants has been taken from production and added, at the prodigious cost and waste, to the oppressive machinery of govewrnment and control. Instead of helping national recovery this is a positive hindrance.”

We will see the same thing with Obamacare.

Jock Colville wrote concerning Churchill and all this: “Never in his life has he felt such despair,” Colville wrote, “and he blamed it on the Government whose ‘insatiable lust for power is only equaled by their incurable impotence in exercising it.’”

Churchill also wrote about the Socialists: “What the German U-boats could never do to us has been achieved by our own misguided fellow countrymen through their incompetence, their arrogance, their hordes of officials, their thousands of regulations and their gross mismanagement of our affairs, large and small.”

Churchill on class warfare and the socialist government that led to years of poverty for England’s masses after WWII, Between the loans “and the unparalleled sacrifices exacted from the taxpayers” there is no reason why Britain should not have attained “solvency, security and utopian independence. This has been denied us not only by the incompetence and maladministration of the Socialist Government and their wild extravagance, but even more by the spirit of class hatred which they have spread throughout the land, and by the costly and wasteful nationalization of a fifth part of our industries.”

Sounds so very familiar to the Democratic Socialist governments of the left.