Yesterday Jack sent me this piece. Everyone who holds up Scandinavian countries as some sort of big-gubmnt ideal needs to think about these points.
At one time, Sweden, a small nation, had the fourth-largest economy in the world. That was in 1970. Twenty-five years later, the economy had tumbled to 14th and the private sector stopped creating jobs, according to Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development data. This wasn’t caused by Sanders’ demonic duo of capitalism and free markets. It was caused by the very policies he idolizes.
“Sweden got rich first with free trade and an open economy, before we had the big government,” Swedish economist Johan Norberg explains ...
“In the 1950s, Sweden was already one of the world’s richest countries, and back then, taxes were lower in Sweden than in the United States.”
It was only after that, says Norberg, “did we start expanding the government dramatically.” ...
“It all ended in a terrible crisis.”
As we have noted before, Sweden has been repealing its welfare state post-crisis. Norberg says the country has become “successful again, but only after a new reform period, with more deregulation and free trade than in other countries.” Taxes have been cut, school vouchers allocated, and the pension system partially privatized as Sweden distances itself from its welfare-state past.
Norberg’s rebuke of Sanders — he never calls him by name, but it’s clear who he has in mind — is reminiscent of Danish Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen, who said he had enough of Sanders slurring his country with the “socialist” label.
Sanders needs more lessons such as these, because he simply doesn’t know what he’s continuously spouting off about. Yet he’s been invited to the Vatican to talk about building a “moral economy,” as if he’s an authority on that subject. Simply put, there’s nothing moral about the economic system Sanders favors — it destroys jobs and snuffs out opportunities to rise higher. What was the Vatican thinking when it extended the offer?
The Vatican was being no less obtuse than Sanders’ American supporters, though, because what they are advocating are policies that in the end will create a terrible crisis in this country.
I have written before that if you care about the potentially poor of the future as well as the poor of today, you tend to favour economic policies that promote economic growth. As Tyler Cowen once opined, "Economic growth is the best anti-poverty programme there is."