Kill people and save money

A modest proposal that may please libertarians

Day after day, I read the same thing: government is evil per se, and we shouldn't have to pay any taxes. The old and poor are a burden on the rest of us.

So are the sick and disabled, but the time for overt Nazism isn't quite yet. However, we are making encouraging progress.

Since 1967, some 7 million unborn British children have been killed. Some of them on grounds of "serious handicap" such as having a cleft palate (shame they didn't get Lord Byron, with his club foot) - but the overwhelming majority of abortions are simply because the child is inconvenient. That's against the law as it stands, but who cares?

This old-style-Oriental solution to problems (Stalin would surely have approved) is weighted towards the lower social classes so, as the authors of "Freakonomics" pointed out, it has a beneficial side effect, in that we're executing common criminals before their career can begin. And compared with the cost of arrest, trial, appeal, imprisonment etc a little fake-objective "pregnancy advice" and a swish of the scalpel are so much cheaper, quicker and final. After all, since 1965 we can't kill adult criminals and despite what Parliament was promised in return for giving up the death penalty, "life" doesn't mean life in jail except in the rarest of cases.

Like so much other bad law and practice, self-deception, poor logic and inconsistency bedevil our approach. Apparently it's okay to terminate a foetus under 24 weeks old, because it doesn't feel pain and is therefore not alive; so with the prior use of a really good anaesthetic, we could make inroads on the prison population right now.

We're doing this already for the sick and depressed, but first we have to send them to Switzerland, sometimes accompanied by a popular children's author who lards his work with references to death and total spiritual annihilation. However, the courts are winking indulgently at those who top their relatives here and are now paving the way for advance carte blanche so the doctors involved won't be prosecuted.

Really, criminals are the glaring exception to our enthusiasm for the short way with those who trouble us.

And after that, we can have a really good go at all those born with deformities (not just the ones whose mum doesn't want them), plus cripples, orphans etc. Worldwide, there's something like 5 million new cases of people permanently disabled each year because of road accidents alone, so there's much to do. And we could always reinstitute forcible sterilization, which was a policy in many countries but which the Germans did so much more thoroughly, as they do everything. In short, let us off anyone who costs more in taxes than he's paying.

Yes, death is not the end, it's the answer. After we have rid ourselves in this way of all social and fiscal burdens, we shall have a thousand years of peace and prosperity. Those who still have life will have liberty, and only libertarians will live.

And money, dear money, the fount and origin of happiness, the fifth element that creates and sustains all, will be safe at last.

Originally published on BOM in 2012