THE thread running through our country’s problems leads inexorably back to the question of how private ownership is both the enemy of rational decision-making and of planning.

Capitalist ideologists argue that the market is the most efficient and rational mechanism for allocating resources and meeting human demands.

If we pluck just one issue from the day’s news we can seen how easily this idea falls apart.

The story that “unashamedly” capitalist rewilders are maximising profits by planting trees, restoring peatlands and installing windfarms across country estates illustrates the idiocy of otherwise desirable activities — essential for preserving the ecological balance and sustainability of our countryside — being subject to the vagaries of private owners of the land we all once held in common.

These activities, in a rationally planned society, would be under democratic control with resources allocated by a national plan that took into account all the variables including the priority in allocating capital investment and human effort.

The factor inhibiting the rational planning and allocation of resources is precisely the question of ownership. But even when ownership is not the immediate issue the superstructural edifice of capitalist political institutions, ministerial prerogatives and embedded ideologies predominates.

Resident doctors have ended a five-day strike operation and say they will resume talks to avoid further strikes. The demands, which are most reasonable, are centred not simply on the question of pay.

But, as the doctors insist, a substantial issue is the lack of training places for resident doctors who cannot progress their careers or begin to specialise until a place becomes available.

Already, of course we have insufficient numbers of doctors. Britain has 3.2 doctors per thousand inhabitants. Pluck a random number of countries from the World Health Organisation and we find out that Spain has four, Portugal 5.8. Norway 5.2, Lithuania 5.1 and Bulgaria 4.9.

There are plenty of less developed countries with very low ratios but socialist Cuba’s 9.4 doctors per thousand people must raise at least a few questions in intellectually curious circles.

Doctors complain that there are not enough training places and that where doctors are trained in Britain at public expense cannot find a training pace and that competition from foreign-trained doctors weakens their chances of finding an opening and that this demonstrates a severe lack of joined-up thinking.

As presented by doctors this is not an argument against the exchange of medical practitioners between different states. Rather it is symptomatic of a lack of planning. This activity would be subject to a rational system that would plan a career path for every expensively trained medical school graduate.

Where existing needs are unmet, then consideration should be given to the selective recruitment of foreign doctors.

The idiocy of leaving the flow of migrants into our labour market at the dispensation of employers concerned to minimise their training responsibiliites to the domestic labour force and relectant to sanction the levels of taxation — at the expense of their profit levels — which a national labour force policy would entail means immigration levels themselves are a random factor in the economy.

It is desperately unfair for developing countries where the doctor-to-population ratios are a very low.

In this we see the toxic combination of a failing capitalist economy failing to train and allocate human resources in a rational way and compensating for this by drawing workers from places that can ill-afford to lose them.

A rationally planned economy based on public ownership is the logical solution to this anarchy of the capitalist market in people and the waste of resources.

It is but another argument for working-class political power.