I have been idling about listening to Milton Friedman's Free to Choose series on Youtube. Yetserday and today it was this one:
Checking my emails after that there was this from Capx.
What goes around comes around.
My personal view is that the primary purpose of a national education system is to nationalise education. Ditto health care. Nationalising education is all about control. Nationalising health care is all about fear, that is to again increase control.
A NHS administrator who bought £160,000 of printer cartridges with public money before selling them on eBay was jailed today.
Madeleine Webster, 47, from Stoneycroft, Liverpool, spent years defrauding her own department by ordering printer cartridges and selling them online. The £160,000 she and her husband Stephen, 46, took from the NHS would have funded six full-time nursing posts, a court heard…
Webster's boss Bernadine Lynam also recalled occasions she had been working late and saw Madeleine Webster and her husband Stephen, 46, removing items from the office via the fire door.
An investigation was launched. It was found that before Webster took over ordering ink cartridges the department spent about £2,500 a year. After it became her responsibility, the bill rocketed to £10,854 in 2008 to 2009, then to more than £27,000, £45,000 and finally £60,000 in the following years.
How the hell is her boss still in a job? You've got an employee with purchasing responsibility who is removing items via the fire door (which is the point where I'd be immediately suspicious, because why are you not going via the normal exits?) with her husband (why is he there doing it?).
Of course, the problem with this really comes back to what Milton Friedman said about spending money. It's not her manager's money, or even his managers money. All the way up the line, the NHS is spending money taken from taxpayers and as a result can spend it as badly as they like.
