Britain yes, John Stossel no!
July 30th, 2007, 2:12 pm · 4 Comments · posted by fsherman
In his column of a week ago, John Stossel discusses “Sicko,” Michael Moore’s new documentary on health care, and debates with Moore himself. Stossel quotes Moore as conceding that the United Kingdom’s government-run health care system is the sort of thing that cripples creativity and innovation: Moore challenges the Brits he knows to name one thing the country has invented in the past 50 years, and they can’t do it.
Apparently Moore was talking to some really ignorant people, because I can come up with plenty of proof that Britain’s creative spirit is alive and well.
•Harry Potter. The woman who invented Harry, Voldemort and Hogwarts is now one of the world’s wealthiest people. And in the classic free-market fashion, her success has benefited lots of others: Publishers, actors, the companies that market Harry Potter board games, the writers of books about Harry Potter and so on.
•Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Still a classic of comedy almost 40 years after the show debuted.
•The Beatles and their music. Need I say more?
•Punk rock. Not to my taste, but still a significant development in music history.
•Alan Moore. The comic-book and graphic-novel writer who gave us “League of Extraordinary Gentlemen,” “V for Vendetta” (both far superior to the film adaptations), the soon-to-be-a-movie “Watchmen” and a great many other imaginative works (which I won’t detail since you’d need to be a comics fan to recognize the names).
•Life on Mars, the award-winning police drama that’s currently being adapted for American TV (tell me again which side of the Atlantic is more creative, please?).
I could add more examples, but why bother? Suffice to say, arguments against government-run health care goes, this is a pretty silly one.
July 30th, 2007 at 5:02 pm
Hmm, the CAT scanner was invented by a Brit. That should count.
July 31st, 2007 at 5:07 am
Thanks. I figured there’d be some inventions but I didn’t feel like making the effort to look them up (DNA, of course, was discovered in England, but slightly outside the 50-year timeframe).
August 2nd, 2007 at 9:11 am
England produced some of my favorite modern writers - Piers Anthony, Neil Gaiman, China Mieville, and Terry Pratchett. England also gave us Bass Pale Ale.
August 7th, 2007 at 11:32 am
China Mieville is fantastic (just read Perdido Street Station). Anthony’s good, but his series always run out of steam (if he could just have stuck to two or three books per series).
Ramsey Campbell, one of my favorite horror writers is also British. And Grant Morrison (Scots) is a terrific comics writer (currently working my way through The Invisibles in trade paperback)
I have a good friend who loves Bass.