Europe

He Has Moxie

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When people hear that I used to work for my local police department, they usually want to complain. “The cops don’t do enough!” is the usual refrain.

My position is that they do as well as they can. Budget constraints also constrain the ability of the police, and the department has to compete with other government agencies for a slice of the taxpayer provided pie. Although everyone interested in the subject should remain wary of excesses and corruption, the vast majority of police forces here in the United States do a pretty good job with what they have. But that isn’t what most people say.

There is never enough cash to provide the equipment the public demands, provide the training the public demands, provide the size of the force the public demands, or provide the services the public demands. People looking at police work from the outside can see that there is a lot more cop work that can be done if there was unlimited money, so how come they can’t get it now without their taxes going up?

I was reminded of the neverending litany of woe while reading this news article. It appears that giant billboards have been erected over the facade of many famous landmarks in Venice, Italy. This has elicited outrage from prominent figures in the art world, who have complained that blocking the view of such historical treasures in order to sell soft drinks and sports watches is an act of “stupidity and incompetence”.

The mayor of Venice, Giorgio Orsoni, says that selling the advertising space is the only way to pay for desperately needed renovations since tax revenues have been falling. He also says that his critics should get bent.

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Sweden – the newest Red State

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America, even with Republicans in the House and possibly Senate, runs the risk of becoming the model sclerotic empire, wasting away while other states move toward more freedom. Canada and Sweden, nations we conservatives and libertarians used to scoff at as silly, are starting to beat the US on measures of freedom and competitiveness.
Sweden is one country to watch. First, it does socialism about as well as any state could. (of course, this is easier when your nation is small, homogeneous, and free of the burdens of world leadership). Next, unlike the US, Sweden is moving in the right direction, toward that conservative (in the true meaning of the word) ideal of a 3rd way, where the welfare state, to the extent it exists, is individualized.

Sweden’s Quiet Revolution
Without much fanfare, the Scandinavian country has been moving away from socialism.

There is something about Sweden that provokes a mix of envy, horror, and bewilderment among American observers. Liberals have traditionally celebrated its cradle-to-grave safety net, while conservatives have disparaged its high taxes and centralized health-care regime. Yet both groups have generally agreed that Swedish-style socialism is a far cry from rough-and-tumble U.S. capitalism.

In fact, contemporary Sweden is much less socialist than many Americans realize. Since the early 1990s, when it suffered a painful financial crisis, the Scandinavian country has deregulated key industries (such as airlines, telecommunications, and electricity), lowered its overall tax burden, established universal school vouchers, partially privatized its pension system, abolished certain government monopolies, sold a number of state-owned enterprises (including the parent company of Absolut vodka), and trimmed public spending. Several years ago, it eliminated gift and inheritance taxes. The World Economic Forum now ranks Sweden as the second-most competitive economy on earth, behind only Switzerland. According to the 2010 Index of Economic Freedom (compiled by the Wall Street Journal and the Heritage Foundation), Sweden offers greater business freedom, trade freedom, monetary freedom, investment freedom, financial freedom, freedom from corruption, and property-rights protection than does the United States.

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Bolstered by prudent economic stewardship and a relatively conservative financial sector, Sweden entered the global recession on a sound footing. While it endured a nasty spike in unemployment, its export-driven recovery has been so vigorous that the central bank is now concerned about inflation risks. In the second quarter of 2010, Sweden posted a 4.6 percent annual growth rate, prompting the Wall Street Journal to hail it as “the biggest success story in post-recession Europe.” It currently has the lowest deficit-to-GDP ratio in the entire European Union. Before the election, Swedish finance minister Anders Borg announced plans to privatize another $14 billion worth of state assets. “If we get a surplus in place,” Reinfeldt told a Reuters interviewer, “we will deliver on tax cuts for 6.1 million workers and pensioners.” (The total Swedish population is roughly 9.4 million.)

To be sure, Sweden won’t look like Hong Kong or Singapore anytime soon. It still has a lavish welfare state, and its aggregate tax burden is still quite heavy. The top marginal income-tax rate is 57 percent in Sweden, compared with 35 percent (for now) in America. On the other hand, a 2008 OECD study found that household taxes are substantially more progressive in the U.S. than they are in Sweden, even after we control for America’s higher level of income inequality. Sweden has a much lower average statutory corporate-tax rate than the U.S., and also a much lower effective corporate-tax rate on new capital investments (according to University of Calgary economists Duanjie Chen and Jack Mintz). Its tax structure is made even more regressive by a 25 percent value-added tax on consumption of most goods and services.

Which brings us to a common misconception about the Swedish system — that it takes from the rich and gives to the poor. Actually, says Lund University economist Andreas Bergh, “the majority of the taxes you pay are given back to you during your life cycle.” Thus, “if you pay more when you work, you will also get more when you retire.” Even upper-class Swedes enjoy bountiful government largesse.

Another popular myth would have us believe that Sweden’s wealth was somehow created or facilitated by social democracy. In reality, “Sweden’s prosperity is the result of well-functioning capitalist institutions,” says Bergh, author of the new Swedish-language book The Capitalist Welfare State. As Cato Institute scholar Johan Norberg explained in a 2006 National Interest essay, the relative “success” of the country’s social-democratic model “was built on the legacy of an earlier model: the period of economic growth and development preceding the adoption of the socialist system.”

Quote of the Day

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The government has embraced an arrogant ideology. They claim to know the key to prosperity. It’s analogous to communism. They thought the same thing. The clever ones – themselves – would run everything. That’s the analogy. The key to prosperity is to let things run themselves. We’ll liberalize everything, let everyone look after himself, let business, not the state, run the economy. The state should have no views, no policies of its own. Just open it all up, step back, let it go and you’ll see how well everything will work if we just leave things alone.

Vaclav Havel

Causality

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Interesting article in The American about how big cities are becoming increasingly inegalitarian. The trend is to have a teeming mass of poverty-stricken wage slaves, with a thin upper crust of jet setters who wallow in the culture and highbrow entertainment that is forever out of the reach of the underdwellers. Upper mobility has vanished.

Hardly news to those of us who live in a big city. But the following caught my eye …

“Perhaps nowhere is the growing class divide more evident than in London, perhaps the world’s most important megacity. Despite a massive expansion of Britain’s huge welfare state, the ladder for upward mobility seems broken, especially in London.”

Couldn’t the expansion of the welfare state have had something to do with all this lack of opportunity, increase in poverty, and general doom-and-gloom?

(Hat tip to Glenn.)

The Turks Just Gassed the Kurds?!?

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The world just changed.

Der Spiegel just reported the following:

German experts have confirmed the authenticity of photographs that purport to show PKK fighters killed by chemical weapons. The evidence puts increasing pressure on the Turkish government, which has long been suspected of using such weapons against Kurdish rebels. German politicians are demanding an investigation.

American built M-60A3 Tanks in Turkish Service

American built M60A3 Tanks in Turkish Army Service

If this pans out as true, and not a Leftist German-PKK disinformation exercise, expect two things —

1) The NATO Alliance as we know it to dissolve.
2) Turkey will go nuclear within a couple of years.

The age of Catalytic Nuclear Proliferation will be upon us, with lethal gas as an accompaniment.

Update: Gatewaypundit is on the case