Equality is not a good thing. It’s not a bad thing either. It’s morally neutral. Less inequality is not a good thing, and neither is more inequality.

For example: The reason living standards are better than they have ever been before is the creation of wealth. What will improve people’s lives most in the future is the creation of more wealth. Inequality doesn’t matter: if someone’s real income doubles over ten years, it just doesn’t matter if someone else’s income quadruples. Except, of course, in the extremely unusual case of the second person’s income quadrupling hindering the growth of the first person’s income. The opposite is much more likely to be the case.

We should also be wary of redistributing wealth, because while it will cause a short-term increase in the incomes of the less-well-off, it will reduce long-term increase.

As Andrew Perraut says,

“if markets are as massively productive as we libertarians believe and compounding returns to growth in the long term are taken into account, you could probably justify no more than very basic safety nets, for fear of distorting the economy and dramatically lowering everyone’s goods in the future.”

So equality may not be a bad thing, but promoting equality is a bad thing for two reasons. Here’s a third: promoting equality kills. The promotion of equality, for no other reason than ideology, is leading directly to many deaths.

I’m talking about the NHS, and the cases of Colette Mills and Linda O’Boyle.

Both were suffering from cancer. The NHS does not have enough money to pay for certain extra drugs. The patients wanted to pay for the extra drugs themselves, but were told that if they did, they would have to pay for their entire treatment: any treatment they were currently receiving for free would cost them. The patients could afford the extra drugs if they continued to receive the treatment they were already getting for free. But they couldn’t afford the whole lot.

The Department of Health said: “Co-payments would risk creating a two-tier health service and be in direct contravention with the principles and values of the NHS.”

Yes, it would. Rather, there is already a two-tier health service in this country. There is the NHS, and there is (better) private healthcare. (It must be better, otherwise people wouldn’t pay for it.) Private healthcare still exists, even if they would like to ban it. (They can’t afford to, of course, because patients going private save the NHS money).

Yes, patients paying for extra treatment would promote the private sector. This would be a good thing. It wouldn’t harm anyone who couldn’t afford to. Indeed, it would help the NHS, because even people who don’t go completely private might start increasing the use they make of the private sector, thus saving the NHS money and allowing it to spend it on those who need it more.

The problem is the people who think that inequality is always at someone’s expense. It isn’t, as these cases show.

The “principles and values” of the NHS are clearly stupid, and lead to entirely preventable deaths.

“It wasn’t going to cost them. I was going to pay for it. How can they say this policy is far more important than somebody’s life?”

Will the Conservatives fix this?

David Cameron, the Conservative leader, said in a statement that it was “tempting” to allow patients to pay for extra cancer treatments that were not funded by the NHS.

The party has been reluctant to express an opinion on the issue, fearing that it could be portrayed as favouring middle-class patients who can afford to buy themselves extra treatment.

I guess not, then.