The State of the nation

The firemen were on strike.I tried to go to the chemist on a weekday but it was closed because it was one o clock despite the fact that all the other shops in town remained open.When I pointed this out to the departing staff and inquired why this was so the fat one replied surlily that 'we have to have lunch'.I resisted the temptation of saying you look like you could do without lunch today and probably quite a few other days as well.Then when I went to the job centre to use the computer for job search I was told it closes at one pm and all the staff decant to the next town five miles away for some obscure reason and at this point I started to see a pattern to all of this, a common denominator and it is this: all these lazy poor service institutions are run by the State.The people who work in them (and I use that word advisedly) do not see what they do as a service to the public but rather as a facilitator to their own ends of having a job and consequently no care or heed of the latter is part of their thinking or mental landscape.The solution of course is to have all the above services removed from State remit and run on free market principles where the public would get a genuine service rather than the polite fiction that prevails at present like a Potemkin village of pretend service concealing a vacuum of incompetence,laziness,arrogance that is born and directly flows from the monopolistic hold on said services by the State.In anticipation of two possible objections to all of the above I will offer the following. Yes,chemists May be privately operated but are presiding over a government sanctioned monopoly namely the handling of prescription drugs.I was seriously inconvenienced by this and could not get the necessary medicinal aid to an associate as a consequence delaying such by an hour.The fire service should be a monopoly of the State some would say but it is hard to see why.The only consequence of this monopoly is the absurd union run Trumpton like outfits across the country that are little more than disguised welfare homes for the bone idle with absurdly over generous pension privileges and retirement rights and bizarre work practices that allow them to get full time wages for what is clearly very part time work enabling them to have another job on the side.The Left as usual are profoundly hypocritical in all of this,defending such restrictive practices and State controlled monopolies whilst forever lambasting the energy companies and other big businesses for holding 'monopolistic' power over the consumers when these are to the contrary an illustration of the proper functioning and operation of competition in the market - hampered and compromised in their operations to the extent that they are only by over regulation and state interference which is becoming of course ever more intrusive and inhibiting by the day.