My wife and I are big fans of the PBS series “Call the Midwife.” She also gets a kick out of how teary-eyed I get watching some of the episodes. Season 12, Episode 4, which aired last Sunday on KQED, was no exception.
Something else happened on it, though, that I found particularly interesting given the implicit position that the show takes on Britain’s expanded welfare state. We’re, of course, meant to believe that the National Health Service is great. Also, in various episodes, this or that nurse reminds a low-income Brit about various subsidies that are available for a wide range of services.
So it was interesting that the latest episode dealt with one of the downsides of having centralized government control. There’s an outbreak of E. Coli in one of the facilities that the Nonnatus House runs and Dr. Turner and various nurses hop to it, moving quickly to quarantine the patients and nurses who are in there and to prevent other people from entering.Note what he’s saying. Dr. Turner was wrong to do what he did so quickly, not because he made the wrong move, but because he assumed he could do it without consulting the Board. Turner had, in Hayekian terms, “local knowledge.” Of course, if he had consulted the Board, it would have taken at least a while for the Board to get back to him, which might have cost lives. (The little newborns were losing weight.) So what mattered to Threapwood (what a great name for a villain) was not saving lives, but losing control. This happens when you centralize power in government.
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