Recent remarks by the Care Services Minister, Paul Burstow, express the warmest goodwill towards unpaid carers who help elderly relatives. But there is something suspicious about this, as about recent expressions of outrage that house owners who go into care homes should be forced to sell their houses to pay their fees, so that their children will be deprived of their inheritance.
We know that, as a population with above-average IQ, pensioners do not attract sympathy, but are scapegoats and whipping boys. So if a Care Services Minister sounds as if he wants to do them good, we must ask ourselves what is his real motivation. It is a case of ‘Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes’, ‘I fear the Greeks when they come bearing gifts’, as a Trojan is supposed to have said when he saw the Greeks, enemies of Troy, bringing a wooden horse (the Trojan horse). When taken into Troy as a harmless gift, armed warriors emerged from it in the night.
Now we may suppose that not only are pensioners personae non gratae, but also that those who are most likely to give them unpaid help are likely to be relatives with above-average IQs. So the object of the exercise is certainly to prevent pensioners in need of help from getting any, at least not without falling into the power of the Welfare State and surrendering their liberty. Also, no doubt, there is an intention to prevent the carers from deriving any benefit from exerting themselves on behalf of their relatives. It might, for example, be preventing their relative from impoverishing himself, perhaps selling his house, in order to obtain paid help from the Welfare State or the free market. And the unpaid carers, or other relatives with relatively high IQs, might then inherit more assets than if they had failed to provide for the needs of the relative.
Clearly, no Care Services Minister could want this to happen. So carers must be protected against themselves; they must not be allowed to decide for themselves what has priority in their lives.
And, after all, what is the real underlying motivation? Nothing to do with health and well-being, we may be sure. The object of socialism is to destroy freedom. A pensioner and relatives who are looking after him probably have relatively high IQs and some middle-class or upper-class relatives not too far back. They are sitting on a chunk of assets, maybe more than one house, and investments, and this chunk will not be diminished so long as they do not pay money to outside workers or sell a house to pay for a state care home, etc.
So the assets will pass on to a population also with above-average IQs, their descendants. What can be done about this? The carers might wish to live in hardship for a time for the sake of the long-term rewards. However, they must not be allowed to work harder than other people decree is good for them. (My education was ruined by people who ostensibly wanted to save me from working too hard.)
The NHS will have to 'cooperate with carers'? But surely that can only mean that carers will be forced into meeting doctors (!) and getting their permission for everything they do. The doctors will say what the carers will be allowed to do, and that which is not allowed to be done by them will presumably need to be paid for. With any luck that chunk of assets will crumble to nothing, long before it might be inherited.