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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: tejek who wrote (326997)	2/22/2007 1:14:45 PM
From: TimF	Respond to of 1578125

My argument is primarily for a free market. A market with higher taxes, may be more free than a market with lower taxes, if there is less regulation, less government ownership of corporations etc. Scandinavian countries have fairly high taxes. They also aren't particularly unfree markets. They aren't as free as I would like, but they are more free (even in purely market and business terms) than most countries. "They fall down in the "Freedom from Government" criteria but do well on some other measures such as "Business Freedom" "Property Rights" and "Freedom from Corruption" " I am not clear what they are talking about in terms of corruption. "Freedom from corruption is based on quantitative data that assess the perception of corruption in the business environment, including levels of governmental legal, judicial, and administrative corruption" heritage.org Interestingly out of all the ratings freedom from corruption has the lowest average score for the world as a whole. Apparently the Heritage foundation thinks there is a lot of corruption out there. I don't disagree. I am not clear what they are talking about in terms of corruption.....the Scandinavians have a reputation for being honest. And the survey agrees with that reputation. As I said the Scandinavian countries get good scores on "freedom from corruption". As for the rest, you need to spend some time over there........things are not as onerous as you guys make them out to be. Again, your agreeing with me, and the survey. The overall economic freedom scores for the Scandinavian countries aren't that bad. You seem to be anticipating me blasting the Scandinavian countries, and then responding to the anticipated blast, rather then what I actually posted. Not on the topic of Scandinavia, but on the larger topic of countries with more economic freedom being wealthier see heritage.org Also see heritage.org

To: tejek who wrote (326997)	2/23/2007 7:49:33 PM
From: Taro	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1578125

The Swedish population of 9 million lives on a country the size of California. This country is full of natural resources like big forests - getting very valuable these days - and last but not least, massive amounts of iron ore, just to mention a few. The Swedish Fe3O4 is the highest quality iron ore available, period. It's also fairly easy to recover with full mountains of it waiting to be harvested up in the North at Kiruna and "Malmberget" (literally "The Mountain of Ore"). So in spite of those Swedish "hobby commies" (Palme!) doing their best to destroy the economy for almost 50 years, they didn't quite succeed. Sweden always was a rich country and had rather few people to feed and thus could afford to have the socialists experimenting while spending the easy money. Norway, of course, lately got their oil and the Finns... well, they have Nokia ;) Taro