A policy of Madness?

Insurance: the only bet you don't want to win. Do you want your house to burn down? No. And yet you make a bet with some company that it will. You bet that you'll lose your mobile phone. You bet that you'll need legal representation. You bet that you'll get injured or ill. You bet that someone will steal everything you own. You bet that all manner of terrible things will befall you and your loved ones. Many people even bet that they'll die. Talk about wishing ill on yourself.

You have to wonder about such behaviour - it's hardly looking on the bright side of life, is it? If you went to a psychiatrist and listed as fears even half of the things covered by the panoply of policy documents we all seem to have these days, before you'd have even stopped talking you'd have a prescription for enough anti-anxiety medication to calm an ocean. Never mind what you'd be given for depression, paranoia, morbid pessimism.

So, are we all neurotic?

No. Of course not. A few of us are psychotic. And the rest of us, we're busy betting that the crazy psychotics will most likely do us harm, at odds that only a madman would think are favourable. What a wonderful world.

I exaggerate, of course. Not all of us are paying hundreds and thousands of pounds to glorified bookmakers, in an effort to assuage our morbid fears: some of us try to opt out of the madness. Either by attempting to become the modern equivalents of the barrel-dwelling Cynics of Ancient Greece, no more possessions than you can carry on your back; or, conversely, by, erm, well, just hoping for the best really. Of course, both of those options will get you stared at like you should be committed. Or at best, like you're wilfully naïve.

You can't win.

Which, not un-coincidentally, is the gist of all that small print that you always start to read, shortly before losing the will to live and just shoving the latest wretched document into the overstuffed file with the rest of them.

Anyway, here's the worst thing: not only does the government not take a good long look at this rampant insanity and do something about it, it positively encourages it. Got a car, it says. Better have some insurance then. Wouldn't want anything to happen, would we? When it comes to car insurance the government's basically the big bald bloke who comes around to enforce someone else's protection racket.

Not that we should expect sound reason, I suppose, from a government that takes a good long look at Northern Rock and decides that to prevent some people losing money it'll pump billions of pounds of everyone's money into it. Oh, and if that doesn't work, they'll nationalise it! With more of our money. Great plan. Well, at least they seem to have remembered they're Socialists. And it only took them 14 years.

Oh yes, and how could we forget National Insurance - state enforced madness, permanently escapable only through death, incapacity, or old age.