Why governments' attempts to pick winners produce more losers than winners.
"The reality on the ground is that there is a gloomy mood. There has been an awful lot of change in a short period. Staff feel overwhelmed by it.” New Health Secretary Alan Johnson Arthur Fonzarelli last week announcing the “once in a generation” NHS review.
"The most radical reform of NHS services since 1948 - designed to halve the number of patients needing hospital care." Interview in the Guardian today with the newly-appointed health minister, Sir Ara Darzi who will oversee the review.
Get your story straight fellas. The Guardian claims that the interview is the "the clearest signal yet that Gordon Brown wants to quicken the pace of NHS reform". What sort of a mixed signal is this government giving to the NHS and its workers at the moment? Just when you think the whole organisation couldn't possibly get any worse, then even the claptrap from government officials starts to fall apart. If anyone has any idea what the government’s policy actually is on the NHS, please let me know.
"In all countries all tax laws are to-day written as if the main purposes of taxes were to hinder the accumulation of new capital and the improvements which it could achieve. The same tendency manifests itself in many other branches of public policy. The 'progressives' are badly off the mark when they complain about the lack of creative business leadership. Not the men are lacking but the institutions which would permit them to utilize their gifts. Modern policies result in tying the hands of innvoators no less than did the guild system of the Middle Ages", Bureaucracy (1945)