So much for socialism....
13 October 2012
Socialists often try to cite Sweden as an example of the success of their creed. After all the Soviet Union, China, North Korea and Cuba are not exactly something for them to be proud of. Likewise the way Labour governments have time after time wrecked the UK economy is nothing to be proud of.
1/ Tax rates were sharply reduced . In 1996, the average marginal rate — the rate on the last bit of income — was 46 percent; in 2010, it was 33 percent.
2/ Spending was cut on old-age pensions, child allowances, unemployment benefits and housing subsidies.
3/ Union power over wages was reduced.
4/ Many markets (banking, air travel, telecommunications, electricity production) were deregulated.
5/ He said Sweden has relied on higher patient payments to discourage people from overusing health services.
6/ Health care has largely been opened to private alternatives. In fact, one of Stockholm’s largest emergency hospitals, St. Göran’s, is a private company listed on the stock exchange.
7/ Low inflation and balanced budgets became broadly embraced popular goals.
8/ Borg argued, The aims were clear: to reward work by cutting income tax rates; to push people back into the labour market by reducing some government benefits; and to promote productivity by increasing competition.
9/ In 2005, Sweden abolished the inheritance tax, gift tax and wealth tax.
http://www.iie.com/publications/pape...t-20120423.pdf
Socialists often try to cite Sweden as an example of the success of their creed. After all the Soviet Union, China, North Korea and Cuba are not exactly something for them to be proud of. Likewise the way Labour governments have time after time wrecked the UK economy is nothing to be proud of.
I suspect they will stop using Sweden as an example in future.
I like Sweden's idea of 'socialism'.... Their Finance Minister, Anders Borg, was speaking at the Peterson Institute on how reforms they made have helped them prosper during the global financial crisis.
Sweden made a lot of changes after a torrid time in 1992 forced their hands when their economy contracted 4%. After their reforms their economy has prospered.
1/ Tax rates were sharply reduced . In 1996, the average marginal rate — the rate on the last bit of income — was 46 percent; in 2010, it was 33 percent.
2/ Spending was cut on old-age pensions, child allowances, unemployment benefits and housing subsidies.
3/ Union power over wages was reduced.
4/ Many markets (banking, air travel, telecommunications, electricity production) were deregulated.
5/ He said Sweden has relied on higher patient payments to discourage people from overusing health services.
6/ Health care has largely been opened to private alternatives. In fact, one of Stockholm’s largest emergency hospitals, St. Göran’s, is a private company listed on the stock exchange.
7/ Low inflation and balanced budgets became broadly embraced popular goals.
8/ Borg argued, The aims were clear: to reward work by cutting income tax rates; to push people back into the labour market by reducing some government benefits; and to promote productivity by increasing competition.
9/ In 2005, Sweden abolished the inheritance tax, gift tax and wealth tax.
http://www.iie.com/publications/pape...t-20120423.pdf
So people - there you have it. The route to better prosperity, so much of which echoes many things I have been saying. Cutting taxes, cutting public spending, more privatisation, less intrusive regulation (but the right regulation), and so on....
- "Not for Sweden the rapacious greed and hunger for war-profits." Tom, have you not heard of SAAB A/B or Bofors, both world leaders in their field of making killing machines and the warplanes needed to deliver them? The Swedes profited handsomely from their neutrality in WW2 thanks to their ability to supply both sides with weapons. Then there's ASEA, now part of ABB, who make all sorts of machinery with defence applications.
As for the Gini quote, so what? Are we supposed to reward success and failure, effort and fecklessness, equally? - What is failure, what is fecklessness, if it is never to be rewarded?
If one were to take an overview, the better to know just what 'success' might be, by looking at the rewards that are handed out, what picture would emerge?
This is the very crux of all the points I made that did not rate mention by you Peter. Yours is a top-down, don't-do-as-I-do-but-do-as-I-say elitist philosophy. The only just reward is that for which YOU strive and achieve. Irrespective of any views except your own and those fellow travellers with whom you agree, and who agree with you.
When those who rule because they rule set out the rules, it is done as with the One-Armed Bandit and the Roulette Wheel. All are welcome to 'participate', a very few may win big, many may win something, but all - save the tumbler-setters - will pay.
Successfulness, could be said to apply to both he who is rewarded with three-sevens and he who sets-up the percentages. Yet the former shall never become the latter.
One puts his money in the slot...and gambles.
The other owns the machine...and invests.
The point of the GINI standard is to separate those who realise that the gambler has to have the wherewithal to gamble [e.g.Sweden] and those who are 'certain' that it all works by magic. [i.e. the UK] - You don't know me or my philosophy Tom, any more than I can make head or tail of yours; I grow weary of your pretentious obfuscations and the reason I didn't respond to most of your ramblings is because I couldn't be bothered to rebut your pointless yet predictable hyphenated catch-phrases. You and your fellow-travellers have made 'elite' a dirty word; made success something to be ashamed of; profit something to be despised; and equality in everything something to be aspired to, regardless of its level or quality. And at the same time you brand those who disagree with you as greedy, uncaring and only-in-it-for-themselves-and-the-money. With all due respect, and subject to the first sentence above, the out-of-a-non-original-left-wing-pamphlet-of-the-nineteen-seventies-ideas you espouse are a crock of excrement.
- "So much for Socialism."
Is the heading of this Blog, and is a nonsense. A comparison of chalk and cheese, amply illustrated in the opening line from what I wrote yesterday...
"... renewing the general framework of the public economy should be done without prejudice"
From, Gustav von Hertzen, chairman of Libera, a free market think-tank in Helsinki.
This what separates the UK from Sweden. "without prejudice"
Is 'elite' to be, that which is richly rewarded for failure? Or is failure only possible in the lower orders?
Profit, is not a dirty word, but nor is it a practical motive or reasonable excuse for exporting jobs and then blaming the unemployed for their own misery. Then to insist that the way forward is for the UK workforce to price themselves in line with the far-eastern counterparts adds to the folly. - I think Barry's point was: 1. Sweden used to be a socialist state but no longer is, although socialists still hold it up as an example of a successful socialist system. 2. It was only by jettisoning most of the trappings of socialism that it has liberated itself and achieved success and 3. we should do the same. Another big difference between us and them is that attitudes in society are not polarised between the haves and have-nots. Do you know many Swedes, Tom? I do.
- "not polarised" was exactly my point.
- I happened to be in Stockholm for the general election in September 2006. Center-right parties made large gains, mainly at the expense of the left. The social democrats and the Left Party both got trounced then, and again in 2010, when the far-right won their first ever seats. So polarisation is alive and well in Swedish politics again, and getting more so.
- It seems that Sweden is much like Shrek the ogre in that there is something of the 'onion' about it, layer upon layer.
As a State it did not enter my consciousness much until it was bigged-up as entirely reasonable over it's claim to Assange. My not being any sort of die-hard Socialist, of the seventies or any other era, Sweden's cuteness or otherwise has not informed my thinking.
I have peeled off another layer this morning, and many of their old ways do seem to resemble how big-business, taxation and politics work in the UK...
"There is an assumption that the welfare states of Scandinavia were high-tax regimes which tried to redistribute wealth from rich businessmen to the average person. This is not the case at all. On the whole the Scandinavian systems are not meant to be redistributive states. Nor are businessmen the targets. Business is relatively lightly taxed compared to many developed nations. It is not the earnings of businesses that the bureaucrats want to control but people. (Comment: This point might be true for BIG corporations that are running the country together with the government (Revolving door business/politics – the same people on the board of a large company take turns to sit in government positions). Small individual business owners are taxed in to oblivion, unable to employ and survive for the most part. Privateers are unwanted in Sweden. They want you working for BIG companies. Entrepreneurship is pretty much non existent in Sweden. As long as you are dependent sucking of the corporate-fashist-government teet, it’s ok.)
The Swedish welfare state, in particular, was designed so that the average individual was highly taxed. There was even the well-known case of Swedish author Astrid Lindgren, of Pippi Longstocking fame, who discovered that her tax bill was 102% of her earnings. Consumers are highly taxed, while business itself is not so highly taxed.
The reason for this is simple. Taxation is a means of control. The object of control in the Swedish system is not business, they produce the golden eggs after all. The object of control is the individual. The Swedish system doesn’t so much redistribute your wealth but confiscate it and return it to you provided you spend it in ways approved of by the political elite. "
I get a sense that the final sentence above rings true for the various utility privatisations that have happened here, including Rail.
I doubt though, that my informant on this occasion would notice much of a difference between the old-ways and the coming of the "far right". Judging by what is written in 'whyileftsweden.com', the far-right was their far-left.
Whether recent upheavals will change the apparent fact that a cup of coffee in Sweden costs three times as much as it does in the US and lead them to enjoy the pricing policy of our Starbucks, remains to be seen.
Their history of gender-(uber)equality and paedophilia (not to mention Government control of Education) gives me more reason for backing Assange's unwillingness to yield to Sweden's arrest warrant.
So if the joint Peter & Barry message is one of, 'ya-boo-sucks' left-fascist is now right-fascist, I am a little less than half way to agreeing with you.
From, Gustav von Hertzen, chairman of Libera, a free market think-tank in Helsinki.
"Corporatist theory, reduced to its bare essentials, is based on the notion of a macroeconomic social contract in which labor keeps down moneywage increases and collaborates on industrial adjustment in return for a 'social wage' in the form of redistributive social and full-employment policies (e.g. Kuttner 1984, 138-168). The additional micro-level burdens that the social wage places on firms is more than balanced by macro-level payoffs in the form of fewer work distributions and a greater openness to new technology. As one corporatist writer put it: 'Labour, interested in wages, working conditions, social security, and to a lesser extent, participatory democracy, is forced to take account of inflation, productivity, and the need for investment; employers, interested in profit, productivity, and investment are forced to take account of social policy' (Wilensky 1976, 53). "
From...Corporatism and the Microeconomic Foundations of Swedish Social Democracy: The Swedish Model Revisited*
Henry Milner, Vanier College, Montreal
"Sweden did not participate in either the First or the Second World War. Therefore, Sweden was in a good position to partake in the rebuilding of a war-torn Europe."
"The Swedish Model
The central feature of the so-called “Swedish model” was the historical compromise between a social democratic ruled state and a widespread privately owned industrial sector. The compromise was some sort of middle way between unlimited private capitalism and socialist planned economy. The ownership of most of the large companies, except for the state owned monopolies, stayed private and expanded at the same time as the public sector expanded.
The "Swedish model "can be summarized as
a large, privately owned industrial sector
a large public sector financed by taxes
a large trade union movement
the state playing an active role in labour market policies
ambitions to achieve an even distribution of income and wealth"
"Government
The government budget has improved dramatically from a record deficit of more than 12% of GDP in 1993. In the last decade, from 1998 to present, the government has run a surplus every year, except for 2003 and 2004. The surplus for 2011 is expected to be 99 billion ($15b) kronor.[30] The new, strict budget process with spending ceilings set by parliament, and a constitutional change to an independent Central Bank, have greatly improved policy credibility. This can be seen in the long-term interest rate margin versus the Euro, which is negligible.[citation needed]
From the perspective of longer term fiscal sustainability, the long-awaited reform of old-age pensions entered into force in 1999. This entails a far more robust system vis-à-vis adverse demographic and economic trends, which should keep the ratio of total pension disbursements to the aggregate wage bill close to 20% in the decades ahead. Taken together, both fiscal consolidation and pension reform have brought public finances back on a sustainable footing. Gross public debt, which jumped from 43% of GDP in 1990 to 78% in 1994, stabilised around the middle of the 1990s and started to come down again more significantly beginning in 1999. In 2000 it fell below the key level of 60% and had declined to a level of 35% of GDP as of 2010.[31]"
From...Wiki-Economy of Sweden.
So much for the background.
Let us not forget that this is a Conservative Blog. Predicated on, "Self, self, self."
That Sweden and it's doings were ever held up by the left in the UK as an ideal model, as is insisted upon here, tells us that the success of Sweden throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty first century was anathema to the right in the UK.
To say that any comparison between Sweden and the UK is a comparison between Apples and Oranges, does not go far enough to explain the fundamental disparities, it is more a case of comparing Chalk with Cheese. (IMO)
Not for Sweden the rapacious greed and hunger for war-profits. Not for Sweden the reliance upon the the smooth shiny front pushed forward to the world that hides the rot beneath, that has long been the mark of 'Great Britain'.
Sweden is a small Nation, pop-9,532,634 (2012) [UK pop, 62,262,000 (2010)]
More importantly, Sweden is One-Nation that lives together, works together, goes forward together and dies together.
And there's the rub.
Sweden does not live or die by Polarising Politics:"Four legs good, two legs bad."
Sweden does not seek to exploit the hell out of their workforce, and hide behind trite homilies to enrich one section of the population alone.
Gini (Standard economic measure of income inequality. Range between 0-1)
Sweden:0.742
UK:0.697
The UK is 44 places behind Sweden.
Make no mistake! The right in the UK wants more, only for itself.