We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
|
James Bartholomew on Sweden James Bartholomew, author of the splendid “The Welfare State We’re In”, weighs on on the subject of Sweden, long a poster child for socialists and possibly, even a certain type of right-winger:
“Sweden is iconic, like Marilyn Monroe or Karl Marx. It is supposed to stand for something special: a kind of paradise where socialism and a big welfare state go together with being a successful, rich country.”
Another paragraph:
“The main trouble is that, when Sweden was as close as it ever has been to being a socialist welfare state, it went bust. For a while it may have seemed like a great model, but the Swedish government ran out of money. Why? Because Sweden found, like Britain, that if you pay people to be unemployed, take early retirement or be sick, you get a gradually decreasing number of people who claim the relevant benefits. And if you have sky-high taxes, people don’t work as hard, or they cheat, or they leave.”
Read the whole thing.
|
Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
|
Small nitpick: It should be “increasing” not “decreasing”. People arn’t THAT self-sacrificing! ;p
Sweden went through that crisis, and although Sweden’s politicians were not bold enough to actually try to dismantle the welfare state, there were smart enough to understand that they should draw a line between that welfare state and the capitalist economy. So if you are running a private company in Sweden, you understand that taxes are high, but you also understand that the government will otherwise leave you alone to run your business in peace. In Britain that is not so, and in the US that is less and less so.
This ultimately makes me fairly optimistic for Sweden, but rather less so for the other two.
Yet more evidence that bad experiences with Socialism are the only effective defense against it. Does rather look like the US is going to have to learn this one the hard way. Wunderbar.
To write an article like this without actually talking about what the financial crisis of the 90s was, nor how they actually dealt with their banking sector is pretty poor really leaving the feeling this was a relatively fact free polemic.
Likewise ignoring the rate of income differential differences and making a big thing of single households and divorce while ignoring that they are genuinely less uptight than Brits and Americans about a lot of sexual stuff too, makes this look even worse.
It’s also worth noting that while Sweden has always been pretty capitalist in it’s business operations, punching way above it’s weight in manufacturing and technology.
Daveon, the article refers to the financial crisis of the 1990s but does not go into a lot of detail about the banking sector. You say “fact-free polemic”, but JB gives examples of how the schooling system works, for example.
As for the issue of divorce, I am bemused at how you imply that this is somehow not as serious as it might first appear because the Swedes are so much more relaxed about relationships. Sounds a bit, well, glib to me. How do you know that divorce and single parenthood is seen as less of a bad thing by Swedes than in most other places?
I’ll happily grant that this article is not a very detailed examination – it is a 2,000 word essay in a weekly magazine, not a policy paper – but your attempt to swat it away is unconvincing.
I found this article interesting and reasonably well balanced, but a bit shallow.
For example, the comment about how business pays a lot of tax, but is otherwise left alone, does not sound right to me. While there has been, and maybe there still is, a tradition of proportionality and fairness in the application of tax and business rules, I cannot imagine it is much better than here.
I did find interesting the fact that voters in Sweden appear more sanguine about reform of the public sector (in particular the NHS) than they are in the UK. Possibly this has to do with memories of post-war reconstruction and how the NHS was part of making the UK a country ‘fit for heroes’.
Whatever the good things are about Sweden, the culture is much more conformist than it is in the UK. Questioning the basic tenets of the welfare state would cause confusion. Try mentioning that ID cards and ID numbers should be abolished on the grounds of freedom and see what reaction you get. Confusion followed by derision.
The UK remains in my opinion a much better place for a freedom loving person to live than Sweden (where I grew up and go back frequently to). While much remains wrong with the UK, it is a few bold policies away from being a pretty decent place to live for a libertarian. That is not the case for Sweden, where the culture is overwhelmingly hostile to libertarian sentiments.
If there isn’t, there probably should be a field of “political anthropology.”
While it has its divisions, Sweden has probably remained a good bit more homogeneous than the U K, which the U S has never been.
“Transition” rather than “Dynamics” have become the rule for adjustments resulting from the “capture” of production surpluses by the various “corporate”-type structures in most of the “Western” civilization, which structures currently (and perhaps for the past century) appear to be oriented toward the status quo, rather than the application of surpluses to dynamics which would continue the expansion of our form of civilization.
Not complaining – just saying . . .