End-Stage Bureaucracy
I have seen the future and it is buried in red tape.
I am just returned from my third annual medical service trip to Ethiopia. A group of physicians and nurses from my church partner with a remarkable organization that provides care and treatment to indigent HIV/TB patients in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital. Ethiopians are, as a group, an industrious people, inheritors of a rich and ancient cultural heritage. But economic success pretty much requires emigration.
The problem is the Ethiopian government: specifically a suffocating, all-encompassing bureaucracy. The most egregious example from last week: During our community outreach clinic in the Lideta section of Addis, relatives carried in a 25-year-old man who had been found two days earlier on the street. He couldn’t move his left arm or leg and was extremely dehydrated. Black Lion, the nearby hospital, had refused to see Ephraim since he lacked a paper from the appropriate ministry attesting to his eligibility for free health care. Since he had previously been in good health and employed—at least immediately prior to his hemiparesis—he didn’t qualify for the paper. After his illness, he qualified but found himself unable to stand in line and obtain official permission to be treated.
We hydrated Ephraim with intravenous fluid, then sent him via private ambulance for a CT scan that revealed a depressed skull fracture and right-sided subdural hematoma. We next bundled the films and Ephraim back to Black Lion, where he finally received the neurosurgery that saved his life. Hopefully, he will regain use of his left side despite the delay in treatment.
In Ethiopia, healthcare for the poor is “free,” which is Amharic for “essentially unavailable.” Likewise, ever since the communist Derg regime nationalized pretty much everything in the 70s, most real property is state-owned, which is to say effectively owned by nobody. In the Bole district of Addis, Moon Village is a shanty-town illegally erected on vacant
state-owned land years ago, today housing thousands of the poorest in corrugated aluminum huts. The bureaucrats in charge of something or other have decreed that Ethiopia needs a new mega-stadium for sports on this location. So at some undetermined moment in the near future, the bulldozers will arrive and the Moon Villagers will need to fend for themselves. Nearby, another shanty-town has already been demolished and new condo towers are being erected at high-speed. As you might expect, pretty much nobody—certainly none of the displaced—will be able to afford to live in these deluxe foreign aid-funded accommodations.
But this is what you get when top-down economic development is the only kind allowed by law.
U.S. liberals never describe the ideal end of their policies. While conservatives point to the Constitution and Declaration as indicia of the ideal society, liberals prefer to focus on the next incremental expansion of state power, the next bureaucratic accretion, without ever detailing the ultimate aim. From health care reform to green jobs of the future, the liberal is always hell-bent on taking us somewhere else, someplace better, but the final destination seems always to linger, indistinct, just over a misty horizon.
I think that destination looks a lot like Addis Ababa.
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Comments :
Dec '10
Re: End-Stage Bureaucracy
Wow. Thanks, Doc. And by that, I mean, thanks for your service to the poor and thanks for so vividly and articulately exposing the Left. We need to constantly be reminded and to get the word out to the rest of the world -- DANGER on the Left.
Aug '11
Re: End-Stage Bureaucracy
You're a remarkable man, George. Entrepreneur, venture capitalist, inventor, physician and humanitarian. If only America had more of your kind.
God bless you.
Edited on Oct 11, 2011 at 4:54pmNov '10
Re: End-Stage Bureaucracy
Exactly to the point. I refer again to my own prescription for a part of our salvation, if soon enough adopted: a limitation upon the delegation by Congress of its power to make law (in the form of rules and regulations) by requiring all rules and regulations promulgated by the bureaucratic machinery to be approved by a majority of both houses of Congress before they become effective. Nothing else will accomplish the purpose. Couple that with term limits and we MAY retrieve our republic.
May '10
Re: End-Stage Bureaucracy
God bless you for doing this, George. "Inasmuch as ye have done it unto the least of these, my brethren, ye have done it unto Me."
Oct '10
Re: End-Stage Bureaucracy
Wow George, I don't know how I missed this post. I came across it looking for something else. For me, the consequences of these terrible conditions is more personal than political, since most of my relatives, whom I don't know well, live there and have to endure such poverty. Maybe one day I'll tag along with you on one of those trips. I'd like to be able to do something myself in the future by helping people become self-sufficient and earn their own living.