Italy's in dire need of help.

Its health care system is collapsing. The coronavirus has put the whole country in quarantine. There are now 15,000 cases, along with 1,018 deaths, the last 24 hours bringing in 188 more. The casualty count is the highest outside China. And it's spreading fast. Until a few days ago, the problem was concentrated in the north. Now, it has spread throughout the whole country.

Anyone with a heart can feel pity and an urge to help them. They need help, bad.

But don't go asking the European Union.

Turns out this open-borders globalist set-up is stiffing the Italians in their hour of need:

First, the EU created the problem by failing to shut down their borders with China, enabling its spread into Italy in the first place. While President Trump was acting swiftly to protect America from the lethal virus, the European Union was saying there was no crisis and calling Trump a xenophobe.

Now, with Italy hit hard based on that hate-Trump 'logic', its medical system is overwhelmed. Its doctors and nurses are exhausted. There's not enough equipment, there's not enough supplies, and the patients keep coming. The Italians are appealing for help with masks, surgical equipment, doctors, anything that will enable them to get through it and save human lives -- and the EU is not giving it.

David Freddoso of the Washington Examiner (hat tip: Instapundit) has a must-read column on how the EU is leaving Italy to fend for itself in its hour of need.

Maurizio Massari, Italy’s permanent representative to the European Union, wrote an opinion piece for Politico Europe Tuesday evening publicly shaming fellow EU states for their failure to help, and once again asking them to come together. Instead, European countries are banning the exportation of face masks and other medical equipment needed to deal with the crisis. Germany's health minister, quoted by Politico, argued that this was necessary: “The market is such at present that masks are not going where [they're most] urgently needed, it’s where people pay most money for them.”

This is absurd. First of all, if Germany's government is really so worried about masks not getting where they're needed (as opposed to covering its own backside), they can donate masks to the Italians, can't they? This complaint about profiteering is really just cover for their own fearful selfishness. 

Why is that a problem? Because the European Union is supposed to be all about lovey-doviness, nations giving of their surplus to help others in the name of the greater good. Everybody sharing, the whole greater than the sum of its parts. Helping the poor out, putting people first (remember how Angela Merkel 'volunteered' the rest of Europe to take in some of the migrant masses she herself invited in? -- I invite, you pay?)  But so much more virtuous than that cowboy regime across the pond.

Freddoso continues:

And it may be perfectly understandable for Germany to want to protect its own national interest in a time of crisis, but it runs counter to the entire concept of the EU that we've been hearing so much about during the debate over Brexit. Member states are supposed to benefit by putting aside their own selfish needs. French President Emmanuel Macron has [called] for an even more united post-Brexit EU. What happened to that? Right now, his government is seizing control of masks throughout France. I haven't seen anything about them ending up in Italy.

And as Freddoso notes, all the Italians are getting is empty EU words, nothing more. So much for all that 'sharing.'

Everyone's a conservative about things they know best.

The hard reality here is that nations act in their own self-interest whether they say so or not. That so much propaganda to the contrary has been mouthed by the European Union in the name of preserving its stateless bureaucracy, and is often believed by local citizens, is a sad story. Up until now, the Italians had to have been confident their association with the EU would help them. Turns out that is a load of hooey, it hasn't. That's reason enough to leave the EU as if the restive nation didn't already have enough such reason. Open borders for disease, closed borders for help with disease, what a bargain. One hopes the Italians will get wise to this and finally pull the plug.

That's not the only thing that's being discredited, though.

Globalism of this EU sort, as it turns out, is absolutely lethal when combined with local socialism.

Italy has socialized medicine, the kind Bernie Sanders seeks to push on America, leaving the country way less prepared to handle the pandemic than countries with free market health care systems.

Italy's central planners didn't plan for enough beds. There's not enough staff. There's no free market to step in and pick up the slack, because it's not allowed. According to this disturbing piece in the Wall Street Journal, there are signs of a medical system failure, the same kind of thing that in previous socialist hellholes, has triggered man-caused famines: the crops were there, the delivery system was disrupted. Now it's a health-care famine for Italy, because, same as Venezuela's oilfields, the cash was spent on today-needs and political crowd pleasers such as "free" stuff, instead of investment in to increase "production" (read: profitability) in the operation itself, the way the private sector does. The net result in Italy is the same result seen in Venezuela and all socialist hellholes: underinvestment, leading to shambling, subpar, shortage-brimming results. Ain't party-elites making all the decisions grand? According to the Journal:

Italy lags other large European countries in provision of acute-care hospital beds, furnishing 2.62 of them per 1,000 residents as of 2016, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. In Germany it’s 6.06 and in France and the Netherlands it’s 3.15 and 3 respectively. That year, Italy devoted around $913 per capita to inpatient acute and rehabilitative care, compared with $1,338 in France, $1,506 in Germany, and $1,732 in the U.S.

 The writer, Joseph Sternberg, notes this:

What accounts for these divergences in health-care resources requires more study than a single newspaper column can provide, but a few early hints emerge. One is the observation that the U.K. and Italy are significantly more dependent on direct government financing of health-care than is France or Germany.

Government accounted for 79% of total health-care spending in the U.K. in 2017, according to Eurostat, and 74% in Italy. Germany and France both rely on compulsory insurance schemes with varying degrees of subsidy and government meddling, but outright government expenditure amounts to only 6% of total health spending in Germany and 5% in France. Covid-19 in this sense is a test of how much one trusts central health planners to make wise long-term decisions that boost resilience in the face of unusual dangers.

 Image credit: Dany Crash, via Wikimedia Commons // CC BY-SA 4.0