Published in the Laissez Faire City Times, June 4, 2001. A Canadianized version appeared in the Financial Post.
The World Health Organization, which held its 54th "World Health Assembly" from May 14 to 22, is longing for the World Sanitary State or, at least, for a World Sanitary Cartel. It aims at global health control by politicians and bureaucrats in white labcoats.
This is not conspiracy theory -- except if you take as a conspiracy a sequence of disconnected events where small groups of different individuals make plans that happen to match. One problem with grand conspiracy theories, where many individuals conspire over long periods of time to achieve complex results, is that they explain everything, and more. Another problem is that such conspiracies are difficult to organize and keep secret. No need for them here. The logic of individual incentives and action in politicized systems, combined with the 20th century's reigning orthodoxy, is sufficient to explain where WHO is heading.
The story told by one of WHO' founders, Dr. Szeming Sze, suggests that it was born from random events, individual whims, and politicking. Dr. Sze was a member of the Chinese delegation at the 1945 conference held in San Francisco to draw the United Nations' charter. The idea of creating an international health agency just popped up in a conversation between the three physicians at the conference. Then, recalls Sze, "I merely talked to my boss and he said 'Yes, go ahead.' ... Almost before I realized what was happening, I was landed with the job of presenting a proposal to the San Francisco Conference that would set up a single health organization." After this, he explains, "my part in the founding of WHO was 90 percent diplomatic and only 10 percent medical. It was politics all the time."
How the constitution was written bore the mark of 20th-century collectivism. Section 1 of WHO's constitution states the organization's objective to "be the attainment by all peoples of the highest possible level of health." This seems meaningless, as nobody would sacrifice everything for health -- for, then, what would health be useful for? But they mean more than health. States the preamble of the constitution: "Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity."
Even so broadly defined, health can be controlled and cured, by medical or social practitioners. For the preamble explains that "[g]overnments have a responsibility for the health of their peoples which can be fulfilled only by the provision of adequate health and social measures." And read Section 11, about the delegates to the World Health Assembly, who "should be chosen from among persons most qualified by their technical competence in the field of health, preferably representing the national health administration of the Member." Labcoats, or whiteshirts, will give you social health.
For Your Health -- Like It Or Not
From then on, the Organization's fate was sealed. Financed by compulsory levies on taxpayers of member states, staffed by bureaucrats selected for their authoritarian busybodyism, it was bound, if unchecked, to become as much interested in alcohol, smoking and political correctness, as in malaria, tuberculosis, or sanitation.
The May 2001 World Health Assemble adopted a biennial $2.2 billion budget, an important part of which is not related to traditional public health activities in underdeveloped countries. The 35 "fields of work" in the budget include Tobacco ($25 million budget), Mental health and substance abuse ($28 million), Women's health ($15 million), Sustainable development ($18 million), Health and environment ($50 million), Evidence for health policy ($43 million). Don't be misled by the vague headings. For example, the field called Health promotion ($35 billion) is assigned the goal of "[reducing] risks to people's health through gender- and age-sensitive policies and actions that deal with the broader determinants of health." (Our quotes are from WHO documents that can be found at http://www.who.int/.)
Moreover, 33 percent of WHO's regular budget, i.e., 12 percent of its overall budget, is allocated to the Geneva headquarters. Another 6 percent of the regular budget is spent in Europe. No doubt there are poorer people in the world who could use these millions.
The main point is that WHO is spending an important, and apparently growing, part of its resources on lifestyle diseases, i.e., to fight lifestyles it does not like. Among the "new ways of working" called for by the "General Programme of Work 2002-2005" is "adopting a broader approach to heath within the concept of human development, humanitarian action, equity between men and women, and human rights, with a particular focus on the links between health and poverty reduction." One of the four strategic directions consists in "Promoting healthy lifestyles and reducing risk factors to human health that arise from environmental, economic, social and behavioural causes."
What of individual preferences for different lifestyles? In responding to individual choices and catering for minority and non-PC preferences, markets have a way to undermine the uniformity of "social choices," which is why the Organization hates the market. Director-General Gro Brundtland talks about the tobacco companies' "unhealthy hunt for profits." "Tobacco," she says, "steal from society." Whom does she take her money from? WHO's hatred of markets is not limited to the smoking issue. For example, says Brundtland, "most biotechnology research is now carried out in the industrialized world, and is primarily market-driven. This is ethically unacceptable." Considering individuals as patients to be taken care of, and cured when necessary, the Sanitary State needs power to impose its opinions.
It also needs faith, in the sense of a corpus of incantations, endlessly repeated, empty beliefs, that will be largely unquestioned by the masses. One such belief is the mystique of the disinterested bureaucrat and politician fighting venal interests. This is why it is so important to demonize tobacco companies, and ignore the smokers who buy their products. Yet, economic theory shows that bureaucrats and politicians are not less interested than producers and consumers, and that the worst dangers come from the former.
One interesting illustration of WHO's faith-bound propaganda was the meeting on Tobacco and Religion held at WHO headquarters in May 1999 (see tobacco.who.int/en/religion/index.html [changed to http://tobacco.who.int/page.cfm?pid=52 in November 2001]). "Religion," argued the Organization, "represents a new frontier for public health in terms of partnership opportunities." Although some religious representatives did put tobacco, alcohol, and prostitution in the same bag of sins, most religions appear relatively tolerant of smoking. The meeting summaries conveniently neglected to report on a presentation (which is however reproduced at the end of the report) by a Protestant pastor, Professor Jean-Claude Basset, who argued that "[i]t is possible to propose to [adult smokers] the ideals of good health but not to impose them, if they prefer other values such as relaxation and the sense of well-being that tobacco induces." The meeting, then, was not a success, and its report is published as a plain Word file [a pdf was added in November 2001], with the caveat that it "is not a formal publication of the World Health Organization."
Now, suppose (just suppose) that there are some individuals (even only one of them) who cannot reach a near complete mental and social well-being while being ruled by the whiteshirts. How then will the whiteshirts realize "the attainment by all people of the highest possible level of health"? Impossible task? Logically, yes; politically, no. They will choose whom to oppress and whom to favor, or they will define social well-being so as to exclude the dissidents' preferences. And they will force the dissidents to pay taxes to their tormentors.
Question: Why don't antiglobalization protesters demonstrate against WHO's global whiteshirts?