Creating and maintaining reliable, efficient and affordable public transportation networks is crucial for developing a more sustainable mobility sector worldwide, though challenges vary by region.
In Europe, gaps are most evident in rural areas, where low population density limits service frequency.
In North America, many cities also suffer from fragmented public transport systems, making car dependency widespread in both rural and urban areas.
In Latin America and South Asia, semi-formal systems such as minibuses are an important and affordable part of transport networks, but often lack reliability and efficiency.
But, as Statista's Anna Fleck details below, according to Statista Market Insights, even regions with strong public transport coverage face affordability challenges.
You will find more infographics at Statista
In Switzerland, for example, average monthly revenue per user was estimated at around $535 in 2025, with other high figures seen in Nordic countries such as Denmark ($491) and Norway ($443).
However, this metric reflects operator revenue rather than typical ticket prices and should be interpreted cautiously.
At the lower end, countries such as Burundi, Malawi and Madagascar show monthly revenues per user below $3, while Bangladesh and India range between $6 and $8.
Overall, the global public transportation sector generated an estimated $294 billion in 2025, an increase of roughly 40 percent from the pandemic-induced slump in 2021.
Tyler Durden Mon, 04/20/2026 - 04:15When Simon Wakter, Political Adviser to Sweden’s Minister for Energy, posted on X last Wednesday with a simple “Wow, incredible article” and a clapping emoji, he captured the shock rippling through Europe’s energy commentariat.
The target of his applause was not some fringe sceptic but Germany’s own Economy and Energy Minister, Katherina Reiche.
In a guest column for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Reiche delivered a verdict that would have been career-ending heresy only a year ago: “One fact has been concealed for too long: an energy transition that ignores system costs will ruin the country it claims to save.” To anyone who has watched Germany’s Energiewende — that totemic experiment in decarbonisation-by-decree — unfold like a slow-motion train wreck, Reiche’s words land like a thunderclap from the Establishment itself.
Here is a senior CDU Minister in Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s Government openly admitting that two decades of Green-inspired fantasy have saddled the continent’s industrial powerhouse with hidden costs now running, according to estimates she cites, at €36 billion a year and climbing towards €90 billion. Grid expansions, backup power for intermittent wind and solar and the sheer inefficiency of trying to run a modern economy on the weather: all of it, she says, must stop being airbrushed out of the official narrative. The self-deception, she warns, is over.
This is not mere technocratic tinkering. It is the first major public crack in the ideological edifice that has dominated German — and by extension European — energy policy since the anti-nuclear, beatnik ’68ers’ generation seized the cultural high ground. Rupert Darwall chronicled the phenomenon with great precision in Green Tyranny: how a handful of German Greens, personified by the sneaker-wearing Joschka Fischer swearing in as Hesse’s environment minister in 1985, exported their peculiar red-green blend of anti-capitalist zeal and romantic environmentalism across the continent and beyond.
That gospel found a ready audience in the Anglosphere. In the summer of 1988, NASA scientist James Hansen delivered his now-infamous testimony to the US Congress, declaring that “the greenhouse effect has been detected and is changing our climate now”. The moment was theatrical, the science shaky, but the political effect electric. It fused with the inchoate ideas already circulating among Western intellectuals: Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb (1968), which prophesied mass famine that never came; Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), which launched the modern environmental movement on the back of exaggerated claims about DDT; and E.F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful (1973), the manifesto of ‘Buddhist economics’ that preached reducing human demand rather than raising living standards. As the great Chicago economist Frank Knight observed, economic progress consists not in suppressing desires nor even in satiating them but in their “ever greater refinement and multiplication” — a direct antithesis to Schumacher’s call for ascetic material restraint as spiritual virtue.
This European ideological curse of environmental misanthropy spread among the young urban intelligentsia of the developing countries through the educational curricula and mass media and the vast number of students studying in the progressive universities of the West, from Canada to Australia, Ireland to Italy and New York to California and Florida.
The spread of Europe’s green gospel was enthusiastically supported by Left-wing billionaire foundations which sprouted thousands of “grassroots NGOs” in Asia, Africa and Latin America. These so-called grassroots NGOs were handy to provide a moral cover for grifting renewable-energy lobbies seeking rents from the public purse. Local ‘Bootleggers and Baptists‘ coalitions arose across the developing countries that derived mutual benefits in Europe’s carbon colonialism. To complete the circle, captured agencies such as the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank and the IMF imposed anti-fossil-fuel constraints as a condition for aid and public finance to poorer African and Asian governments.
At the root of it all lay Europe’s long love affair with Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s “noble savage”, the fantasy that the simple, low-energy lifestyles of Tahitian natives represented a purer existence than the artifice of industrial civilisation. When Voltaire received a copy of Rousseau’s book The Social Contract, he replied:
I have received your new book against the human race, and thank you for it. Never was such a cleverness used in the design of making us all stupid. One longs, in reading your book, to walk on all fours. But as I have lost that habit for more than 60 years, I feel unhappily the impossibility of resuming it.
Perhaps the German intelligentsia never saw the thrust of Voltaire’s rather disdainful response to Rousseau’s love affair with Pacific Islanders.
What began as German domestic posturing metastasized into EU-wide dogma with Angela Merkel’s fateful 2011 decision to shut the country’s nuclear plants after the Fukushima incident in Japan. The results were as predictable as they were catastrophic. Germany, once the engineering envy of the world, now imports electricity when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine. It has destroyed its nuclear industry — 20 gigawatts of reliable, low-carbon baseload — only to watch coal-fired plants, including the dirty lignite variety, roar back to life.
Fritz Vahrenholt, one of the few credentialled German voices who has consistently refused to drink the Gaia Kool-Aid, pointed out in an interview last week that the country sits atop enough domestic gas reserves for 25 years of secure supply. Yet it refuses to exploit them, crippled by what he calls the “German disease” of nature worship.
The March 2026 closure of the Strait of Hormuz by Iran’s IRGC merely administered the coup de grâce to an already terminal patient. Qatar’s force majeure on LNG shipments removed nearly 20% of global supply overnight. European gas prices spiked and power prices followed as German storage levels plunged.
Suddenly the same political class that had spent years lecturing voters about the moral imperative of Net Zero found itself quietly dusting off moribund lignite coal plants previously earmarked for closure. A ‘renaissance for coal’ is how analysts describe the spectacle. The prior government’s solemn pledge to phase out coal by 2030 now reads like a bad joke told at the expense of German households and manufacturers.
In a Facebook post, the TechTimes said:
In a move that highlights the severe economic strain of the Middle East conflict, the German Government is reportedly considering a ‘renaissance for coal’ to prevent a total energy meltdown. … While Germany has spent years pushing for a 2030 coal phase-out, the current energy crisis has forced a pivot toward energy security over climate targets. Reports indicate that several lignite units, previously held in safety reserve, may be returned to full market operation.
Conservative leader Alice Weidel, riding a surge of popularity for the conservative-populist AfD party that is now second only to the ruling CDU/CSU coalition, has forthrightly stated that under an AfD-led government, the Net Zero movement would be rejected:
We must also declare the climate crisis over. The whole thing is, as the American President so nicely puts it, a hoax – it is a complete scam. … We must immediately end the failed Energiewende. We must also immediately cut back and eliminate the waste of resources and the subsidies for so-called renewable energies.
German Energy Minister Reiche is not alone in her seeming Damascene conversion. Chancellor Merz has repeatedly called the 2023 nuclear shutdown a “serious strategic mistake” that left Germany vulnerable to import shocks and deindustrialisation. Even EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, that high priestess of the Green Deal, stood before a nuclear summit in Paris on March 10th and confessed that “reducing Europe’s nuclear sector was a strategic mistake”. Reliable, affordable, low-emission power had been sacrificed on the altar of ideology, she effectively admitted — 15 years too late for the German utilities that had already been forced into insolvency or foreign ownership.
Yet these deathbed ‘repentances’ cannot disguise the deeper truth: the entire red-green project was always a triumph of wishful thinking over engineering reality, favouring Rousseau’s imaginations of noble savages in the South Pacific over Voltaire’s rather commonsensical rejection of being told that walking on all fours was heavenly.
The West’s punitive climate policies — layered atop self-inflicted energy sanctions on Russia — have boomeranged with spectacular precision. Entire sectors of German manufacturing have decamped to jurisdictions unburdened by the climate industrial complex. Energy-intensive industries that once powered the Mittelstand now eye the exits, while households stare at electricity prices that remain among the highest in the developed world.
Following the recent elections in Baden-Württemberg, the exasperated pseudonymous commentator Eugyppius remarked that: “Stupid people in Baden-Württemberg hand massive electoral victory to the Greens so they can continue to sacrifice their industry to the weather gods.” For the German Greens and their socialist allies, of course, the stupid people are the working- and middle-class majority who are ‘climate deniers’. Never mind that they are cost-of-living realists who notice when their heating bills triple, when German industry bleeds jobs and when the same politicians who preached energy poverty as virtue now scramble to fire up the dirtiest coal plants to prevent blackouts.
The polling numbers tell the story with merciless clarity. Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) is now routinely polling at 25–27% nationally, ahead of or level with the CDU/CSU in several surveys. In western states long considered immune to its message, AfD has doubled its vote share in Baden-Württemberg and Rhineland-Palatinate. Its platform could not be clearer: man-made climate change is a ‘scam’, the entire Net Zero apparatus a vehicle for crushing industry and sovereignty.
Enter the ‘Far Right’This is not fringe muttering; it is the explicit rejection of the Energiewende that Reiche herself is now edging towards. The pattern repeats across Europe. In France, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally leads Presidential polling by framing the Green transition as “ultra-ecological fanaticism” that punishes farmers and motorists while enriching the Davos set. Britain’s Reform UK under Nigel Farage mocks Net Zero as “Net stupid Zero” and surges on promises to drill domestic resources. Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, though more circumspect in office, has little patience for Brussels’s eco-mandates and has quietly prioritised energy security over emission targets. Even a section of British Conservatives, once captured by the same delusions, have begun to row back on timelines that threatened to bankrupt households.
What unites these movements is not they are led by ‘far-Right’ extremists, as the legacy press hysterically insists, but a straightforward recognition that ideology has collided with physics and economics. German households — those not among the young urban Greens steeped in deep-ecology dogma — are fed up. They have watched their country destroy its nuclear fleet, subsidise intermittent renewables to the tune of hundreds of billions of Euros and then beg Qatar and the United States for LNG while quietly reopening coal mines. The same elites who imposed these costs now express shock that voters are turning to parties promising relief.
The Hormuz shock has merely accelerated a reckoning that was already baked in. Ireland’s riots and protests over energy-driven cost-of-living pain offer a grim preview of what happens when governments refuse to admit their role in manufacturing the crisis. Dublin is quietly backing down without ever conceding the policy errors that made energy poverty inevitable. Berlin, Paris and Brussels are engaged in the same contortions: walking back punitive green measures while pretending the original strategy was sound.
History’s reckoningYet there is a larger historical arc at work. The German Greens’ capture of energy policy was never really about climate; it was about power — cultural, political and economic. It represented the final victory of a post-1968 worldview that equated industrial civilisation with original sin. BRICS nations and the Global South have no intention of sacrificing development on the altar of Western guilt. China builds coal plants and nuclear reactors with equal enthusiasm; India refuses to apologise for using its own coal.
Only in Europe did policymakers convince themselves that virtue-signalling could substitute for watts. Reiche’s epiphany, however partial, is therefore welcome. So too are Merz’s and von der Leyen’s belated acknowledgments. But rhetorical corrections will not suffice. Germany must confront the full cost of its ideological detour: the lost nuclear capacity, the stranded assets, the industrial hollowing-out and the political polarisation that has handed AfD its strongest hand since its founding.
The question is whether the Establishment possesses the courage to follow where basic economics and common-sense leads — towards a pragmatic energy mix that includes nuclear revival where feasible, domestic fossil resources where necessary and an end to the ruinous subsidies that have enriched renewables rent-seekers while impoverishing citizens.
Fifteen years after Merkel’s nuclear panic and decades after the Greens first infiltrated the corridors of power, reality is reasserting itself with the cold logic of physics and markets.
The fevered dream of a weather-dependent utopia is dissolving under the pressure of rolling blackouts, price spikes and voter revolt.
What comes next will hopefully be a return to something more honest: an energy policy grounded in engineering, not eschatology. For a country that once prided itself on Sachlichkeit — sobriety and realism — the awakening cannot come soon enough. The alternative is not climate salvation but national decline. Germany, and Europe with it, stands at the threshold. The only question remaining is whether its leaders will step through it before the lights go out for good.
Tyler Durden Mon, 04/20/2026 - 03:30Germany sits at the center of Europe’s trade network, but it is not the only global force shaping the continent’s economy.
This map, via Visual Capitalist's Gabriel Cohen, highlights the top trading partner of each European country based on International Monetary Fund data for Q1-Q3 2025.
Europe’s nearly $30 trillion economy is diverse and spans sectors such as energy, manufacturing, and agriculture, yet nearly half of all European countries rely on the same major trading partner for their imports and exports.
Germany: The Center of EuropeGermany is the top trade partner for 19 European countries, more than six times as many as the next closest countries, which each count just three.
This dominance reflects Germany’s central role in European manufacturing, supply chains, and intra-EU trade.
The table below shows how many European countries rely on each nation as their top trade partner, highlighting Germany’s outsized role in the region.
The Dutch, French, and Italian economies, among others, are closely linked to Germany, which is a major industrial player and consumer of primary goods ranging from crude oil to agricultural products. German cars and other high-value exports, meanwhile, have found success across European markets, especially within the 27-member European Union.
The following table shows each European country’s largest trade partner.
While Germany is Europe’s trade giant, its own largest trade partner is the Netherlands. The two countries have an annual trading relationship worth more than $200 billion, marked by extensive economic integration and joint supply chains.
The Netherlands, home to Europe’s largest seaport at Rotterdam, is also the main trade partner of neighboring Belgium, with which it forms part of the Benelux union.
Europe’s Other Top Trading PartnersMany European countries trade most with their largest neighboring country. For example, Malta’s main trade partner is Italy. Portugal’s top trade partner is Spain, while Spain’s is France.
The Baltics take this a step further: Latvia’s largest trade partner is Lithuania, while Lithuania’s is Poland. Estonia’s main trade partner is Finland, while Finland’s is Sweden. Poland and Sweden, in turn, maintain their largest trade relationships with Germany.
Some clear exceptions emerge. As the world’s largest economy, the U.S. is the primary trade partner of Ireland, the United Kingdom, and Switzerland.
The Rise of China to the EastWhile Germany dominates within Europe, China is expanding its influence along the continent’s eastern edge.
It is now the top trade partner for Russia, Ukraine, and Turkey, displacing traditional European partners such as Germany in some cases.
Chinese exports to Russia and Ukraine play a major role in the country’s relationship with both Eastern European nations. Beijing also imports significant amounts of primary goods from the two warring countries, including food and mineral products from Ukraine as well as hydrocarbons from Russia.
If you enjoyed today’s post, check out The $19 Trillion European Union Economy on Voronoi.
Tyler Durden Mon, 04/20/2026 - 02:45Since Ukraine’s population has shrunk dramatically, the army’s number one problem is no longer the lack of weapons, such as ballistic missiles and air defense systems, but the lack of soldiers to operate them, writes Világgazdaság.
The authorities in Kyiv, however, must bring the army size required by Commander-in-Chief Zelensky (800,000 active soldiers), and since the number of men eligible for military service (between the ages of 18 and 60) is slowly running out, the Ukrainian leadership is now trying to fill the gaps by conscripting women.
As of early 2024, approximately 5 million men are considered to be of conscription age in Ukraine, reduced from about 8.7 million before the February 2022 invasion due to death and emigration.
And yet, many of these 5 million are exempt, unfit for service, or already serving.
Ukraine has long been shown to use forced conscription methods, with increasing violence, leading men to attempt to leave the country, often at the risk of their lives.
Last year, Hungarian channel M1-Hirado recently ran a special compiling some of the latest footage of Ukrainians being beaten and shoved into vans in forced mobilization operations.
Citizens across the country have fought back since the war began, especially in areas populated by ethnic Hungarians, who feel they have been targeted.
As of now, there is no full mobilization of women.
According to lawyer Rostislav Kravec, the fact that women can also be included in the list of those who refuse military service or deserters could be a kind of “test” by the authorities.
This way, they can gauge how public opinion would react to the general, mandatory mobilization of women.
Meanwhile, although both sides have contended claims of territorial gains or losses, Russian armed forces are slowly pushing Ukrainians out of the fortified towns in Donbas.
Tyler Durden Mon, 04/20/2026 - 02:00Authored by William Andersen via The Mises Institute,
Christianity Today recently published an article by Kristy Etheridge that was very critical of Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) program, something that would not be surprising, given the magazine’s evangelical Christian outlook on issues.
The article—again, not surprisingly—dealt mostly with how many Christian groups, and especially the Roman Catholic Church, have spoken out against Canada’s program and similar programs in Europe and in the US.
Wrote Etheridge:
Many Christians spoke out against assisted suicide in the 1990s when Dr. Jack Kevorkian became a household name for participating in dozens of suicides in Michigan. Since then, evangelical passion against assisted suicide seems to have waned. While evangelicals have left a void in many public spaces regarding end-of-life issues, the Catholic church has often stood in the gap. As more states and countries consider legalizing the practice, believers must raise their voices together in defense of life.
Christians who oppose assisted suicide affirm that life is sacred. God created human beings in his image (Gen. 1:27), and we do not have the right to destroy ourselves or each other.
Brad East, writing in Christianity Today, noted:
The church’s moral teaching has always held that murder—defined as the intentional taking of innocent life—is intrinsically evil. It follows that actively intending the death of an elderly or sick human being and then deliberately bringing about that death through some positive action, such as the administration of drugs, is always and everywhere morally wrong.
Promoters of assisted suicide always couch their arguments in the language of compassion for those suffering from terminal illness, and 11 US states also permit assisted suicide, all of them except for Montana being dominated by the Democratic Party. This practice always has been couched in the language of “death with dignity,” and it generally has strong support from the political left, although the hard-left socialist publication, Jacobin, recently had an article by Jeremy Appel critical the circumstances under which some Canadians choose suicide, declaring:
But the legalization of MAiD has brought to the fore some disturbing moral calculations, particularly with its expansion in 2019 to include individuals whose deaths aren’t “reasonably foreseeable.” This change opened the floodgates for people with disabilities to apply to die rather than survive on meager benefits.
I’ve come to realize that euthanasia in Canada represents the cynical endgame of social provisioning within the brutal logic of late-stage capitalism — we’ll starve you of the funding you need to live a dignified life, demand you pay back pandemic aid you applied for in good faith, and if you don’t like it, well, why don’t you just kill yourself?
The problem with my previous perspective was that it held individual choices as sacrosanct. But people don’t make individual decisions in a vacuum. They’re the product of social circumstances, which are often out of their control.
It is not surprising to see Jacobin blaming capitalism for something done within the confines of a socialist system, but socialists go by the mindset that says if something is bad, it is the fault of capitalism, since socialism produces only happy results. But Appel is not wrong in pointing out that what began as a way ostensibly to end the suffering of terminally ill people has morphed into a program responsible for one in 20 Canadian deaths, with more than 100,000 people killed since the program began a decade ago, as Canada’s government did away with the requirements that only those with terminal illnesses could request doctor-assisted suicide.
Indeed, the government is happy to recommend MAID to people for a variety of reasons. An 84-year-old woman who visited a Vancouver emergency room with back pain was offered MAID by an attending physician, a suggestion the woman turned down. The government is even expanding its program to cover people with mental illness, including veterans who experienced PTSD as a result of trauma suffered in combat in places like Afghanistan, with MAID eligibility for these people coming in 2027. Appel writes:
In another instance, retired corporal Christine Gauthier, who is paraplegic and competed for Canada at the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Paralympics and the Invictus Games, was offered assisted suicide, with Veterans Affairs offering to provide her with the necessary equipment.
Gauthier had been fighting for five years to have Veterans Affairs provide her with a wheelchair ramp. They wouldn’t provide the ramp, but they would give her the means to end her life.
Most Critics Fail to Recognize the Real Reason Maid ExistsThere are plenty of religious and moral reasons to criticize this kind of a program. Although many libertarians have openly supported assisted suicide (with some exceptions), it is important to separate the “right to die” movement from programs like MAID in Canada and in Europe, such as the Netherlands, which has had an assisted suicide law on the books for more than 20 years. Whether or not one supports such policies, as bad as many believe they are, it becomes much worse when government healthcare agencies are the entities recommending that people have doctors put them to death, as there is no way a program like this does not become coercive.
In a country like the US, the government cannot refuse medical care to someone who does not seek another doctor to end one’s life. In Canada and most European countries, that is exactly what the government can do. While entities as far apart religiously as many religious groups and Jacobin might decry the same things—for different reasons—they are united in their support for the welfare state and state control over medical care.
The Christianity Today writers and others in the evangelical camp such as World Magazine tend to frame MAID as a purely ethical issue, and while ethics obviously play an important role in all of this, none of these writers seem to understand that Canada’s government-controlled system has made good medical care even more scarce than it should be. It should be obvious even to someone like Appel that Canada’s system reduces the amount of available care, which should surprise no one who is familiar with socialism.
As noted before, many of complaints against assisted suicide are rooted in a belief that people choose to have medical providers kill them is because they lack resources. Appel writes:
An excellent piece from Global News reporters Brennan Leffler and Marianne Dimain, headlined “How poverty, not pain, is driving Canadians with disabilities to consider medically-assisted death,” notes the “excruciating cycle of poverty” that leads disabled people to choose assisted death, rather than live a life filled with barriers to their existence.
Appel then declares more government spending as the solution:
We’ve let the MAiD genie out of its bottle. There’s no going back. We must ensure that our health care systems have sufficient resources to guarantee everyone, regardless of ability or mental health, a dignified existence.
Appel, however, has it wrong. Poverty supposedly does not matter in the Canadian system because no one pays for medical care. This isn’t a case of Joe dying of liver disease because he can’t afford a liver transplant; this is about Canada’s system having shortages of doctors, equipment, medicine, and all of the other components of healthcare, and shortages are a feature of socialism.
In other words, the way to keep people from using the medical establishment from taking their own lives is to expand medical care, and since outfits like Jacobin see government as the only legitimate provider of health care, that means pouring even more tax revenues into the medical system. Yet, it should be clear that government control of the medical system—especially in Canada—has very predictable results: shortages and denial of care.
More than 20 years before Canada instituted its MAID program, Jane Orient—a practicing physician—predicted that the Canadian system would find that the premature death of patients would provide financial savings to the program.
Writing about government-provided care, she likened it to providing only freeways to move automobile traffic:
Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have all the medical care you needed or wanted, without ever worrying about the bill?
And wouldn’t it be wonderful to drive to work every day without ever paying a toll or stopping at a red light?
The second question usually provokes much more critical thought than the first. Before people vote the money to build a freeway through their downtown, a lot of inconvenient objections are raised.
The first is this: Do we want to tear up the main business district of town?
The idea of “comprehensive health care reform” to “assure universal access” should stimulate the same thought process. To build such a system, you start by destroying the insurance and medical system that we already have.
She continued:
When we build a freeway, we don’t necessarily destroy all the other roads. In Britain and Germany, private medicine is allowed to coexist with nationalized medicine. But in Canada, it isn’t. If you’re a Canadian and want something the government isn’t willing to pay for, or you want it now instead of three years from now, you have to go to the United States.
A lot of proponents of “universal access” want to close the private escape hatch. They want no other roads, just the freeway. Of course, there may be some back alleys or secret tunnels or special facilities for Congressmen, but those won’t provide American-class medical care to ordinary folk.
Some think we don’t need other roads if we have a freeway. But remember what a freeway is: a controlled access road.
Orient continued her freeway analogy, noting that the Canadian system is not built on ensuring better care, but rather promoting equal care, even if that care might be substandard or even non-existent:
In Canada, you don’t have to pay to get medical care. In fact, you are not allowed to pay. Once the global budget is reached in Canada, that’s it. The on-ramps are closed. It doesn’t matter if you have money. Hospital beds are empty for lack of money to pay nurses, and CT scanners sit idle all night for lack of money to pay a technician. But if some people are allowed to pay, Canadians fear that some people might get better care than others.
In other words, Canadian care is more about people equally sharing scarcity than being able to get medical help for their ailments. She noted that the government systems like what we see in Canada routinely deny care for serious illnesses and medical problems, while promoting euthanasia as a solution:
The roadblocks are at the exits that lead to the hospital. The global budgeters “contain costs”—ration health care—by denying those things that you do need insurance to pay for: heart surgery, radiation treatments for cancer, hip replacements, things like that. Out of “compassion,” reformers may open another exit: the one that leads to the cemetery. Do you think it’s accidental that euthanasia and “universal access” are on the agenda at the same time? When government gets involved in providing health care, health care must be rationed.
Given that medical care is a scarce good, there always will be tradeoffs and some form of rationing. However, government systems discourage entrepreneurship and are more likely to be restrictive, increasing the scarcity problems and making it even more difficult for people to receive care that can make the difference between life and death.
Advocates of state-sponsored medical care claim that rationing by price is immoral, but rationing by bureaucratic decree is a moral imperative.
Thus, if Joe were to die because he could not afford a heart transplant, that would be immoral, but if he were to die because the government agency making those decisions denied that care, that would satisfy all moral criteria.
ConclusionAssisted suicide is on the increase in places like Canada because it permits the government to deny medical care in the name of compassion and “dying with dignity.” It should not be surprising to see increased rates of doctor-sponsored killing running parallel with more government involvement with health care.
As we see more state involvement with medical care, the relative scarcity problems with health care will increase, and as medical scarcity increases, physician-assisted suicide rates also will rise. Death is already built into socialism, so we should not be surprised to see practitioners and advocates of socialized medicine welcoming the Grim Reaper as one of their own.
Perhaps the greatest irony is that the mainstream Christian groups (such as the Presbyterian Church USA and the Episcopal Church) that openly support the Canadian system and demand it be implemented in the U.S. are silent about the proliferation of medical suicide incidents, either ignoring the problem altogether or quietly supporting it.
Because they are blind to the negative effects of the massive state-sponsored intervention they support, their response to MAID and other assisted suicide movements is to call for more of the same.
Tyler Durden Sun, 04/19/2026 - 23:20