Exactly, why don't the Republicans remind the American people Teddy killed a girl, Hillary stole and hid FBI files for a Year, Kerry lied about his service, Byrd was head of the KKK...And the democrats want Socialism???
From socialism to sex shortages
Bad news for Europe• April 19, 2005 | 2:19 AM ET
I offended my co-blogger Eric Alterman a while back by linking to studies suggesting that Sweden's economic performance was pretty weak compared to that in America, and that it made a poor policy-model for those advocating higher taxes and more government programs.
Well, there's more bad news for Sweden, and for Eric, as Bruce Bawer reported in The New York Times this weekend that the picture is grim not only for Sweden, but for all of Europe -- and it seems to be the grimmest where taxing and spending and regulation are the highest:
Alternatively, the study found, if the E.U. was treated as a single American state, it would rank fifth from the bottom, topping only Arkansas, Montana, West Virginia and Mississippi. In short, while Scandinavians are constantly told how much better they have it than Americans, Timbro's statistics suggest otherwise. So did a paper by a Swedish economics writer, Johan Norberg. Contrasting "the American dream" with "the European daydream," Mr. Norberg described the difference: "Economic growth in the last 25 years has been 3 percent per annum in the U.S., compared to 2.2 percent in the E.U. That means that the American economy has almost doubled, whereas the E.U. economy has grown by slightly more than half. The purchasing power in the U.S. is $36,100 per capita, and in the E.U. $26,000 - and the gap is constantly widening." The one detail in Timbro's study that didn't feel right to me was the placement of Scandinavian countries near the top of the list and Spain near the bottom. My own sense of things is that Spaniards live far better than Scandinavians.
...
In late March, another study, this one from KPMG, the international accounting and consulting firm, cast light on this paradox. It indicated that when disposable income was adjusted for cost of living, Scandinavians were the poorest people in Western Europe. Danes had the lowest adjusted income, Norwegians the second lowest, Swedes the third. Spain and Portugal, with two of Europe's least regulated economies, led the list.
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The thrust, however, was to confirm Timbro's and Mr. Norberg's picture of American and European wealth. While the private-consumption figure for the United States was $32,900 per person, the countries of Western Europe (again excepting Luxembourg, at $29,450) ranged between $13,850 and $23,500, with Norway at $18,350.
What's more, even the public sector seems impoverished:
In Oslo, library collections are woefully outdated, and public swimming pools are in desperate need of maintenance. News reports describe serious shortages of police officers and school supplies. When my mother-in-law went to an emergency room recently, the hospital was out of cough medicine. Drug addicts crowd downtown Oslo streets, as The Los Angeles Times recently reported, but applicants for methadone programs are put on a months-long waiting list.
It's almost as if high taxes, heavy regulation, and an extensive dole sap people's desire to work hard, making the society as a whole worse off so that those policies don't just redistribute wealth, but actually destroy it. That's probably because they do, and have done so everywhere they're tried. People are usually pointing to some socialist paradise or other where life is wonderful, but -- not to put too fine a point on it -- those places are basically a lie. Socialism just doesn't work, anywhere, for very long. You'd think people would learn.
One of the unfortunate things that happens under socialism is that people have fewer children. (This is a bug. For a while it was seen as a feature, but with the world now facing a global baby bust, it's a bug.) This disturbing essay from The Belmont Club spells out what Europe's demographic collapse means. I think it's a bit on the pessimistic side -- but the Europeans had better hope that I'm right about that. And we Americans should be very grateful that we didn't follow the Swedish model. Socialism produces shortages -- and in Sweden's case, apparently, it's even managed to produce a sex shortage among the formerly randy Swedes. Which just proves that too much government can ruin anything, given enough rope.
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