Posted on 04/19/2008 2:08:46 PM PDT by WesternCulture
Yes there is.
Read on and you'll find out about it.
Capitalist paradise exists here on Earth.
However, it comes with a price tag called "competence".
Most of the world lacks this "competence" and will have a hard time aquiring it, because it is a matter of spirit, a spirit that I'm convinced most parts of the world ever will fail to aquire.
In my opinion, Scandinavia leads the world in true Capitalist endeavour (check out how many multinationals we possess in realation to population size).
The explanation for this tradition of entrepreneurship is not Scandinavian "Socialism". Sooner, it is a question of Scandinavian FREEDOM.
While continental Europeans suffered under the yoke of Feudalism, Scandinavians were running their own farms!
This is a MAJOR and often overlooked explanation behind our unparalled competence in the field of producing successful companies as well as producing wealth. Entrepreneurship is more or less in our blood.
Our prosperity is NOT a matter of coincidence.
I am a son of Gothenburg, Sweden, Scandinavia.
The region of Gothenburg is a part of Europe which would be churning out heavy trucks, buses, luxury cars and heavy industrial equipment even if she daily was struck by nuclear assaults.
It's a question of work ethics combined with self-reliance. Without a widespread attitude like this, Sweden wouldn't house more BMWs per capita than Munich, the home of BMW, or more Audis/capita than Ingolstadt etc, etc.
While continental Europe is away from its 6 hour work day due to ridiculous strikes, Scandinavia is working overtime.
The founding of the major port city of Gothenburg here on the West Coast of Sweden meant the guaranteed death of Danish hegemony over the Baltic region (Sweden could hereby reach the Seven Seas) and in the end, even our Viking brothers and sisters in Denmark accepted the cold, hard, concrete reality of Gothenburg - today a thriving little city of (almost) one million inhabitants on the go.
I've found out people from this home city of mine seldom reflect upon the fact that we DESERVE to drive around in luxury cars, travel around the world and live in affluence. We take it for granted. But why is this so? I think it's because a true lifestyle of progress can be taught.
In Gothenburg, you'll meet with few inhabitants who claim they're rich (even if their family owns two houses and a Volvo XC90). BUT, if you ask them if they feel strongly convinced their sons and daughters will be even better off than they, they'll answer:
YES!!!!
THIS is a sign of a well functioning Capitalism structure.
I've never been a soldier, but I sure have experienced a frontline;
The assembly line of Volvo - Try it, you won't like it.
Still, Volvo is an extremely well run company (although Ford isn't) and I'm proud of living in a country where such an example of modern Capitalism (and American-Swedish cooperation) exists.
For better or for worse, Scandinavia is a part of the world where Capitalism is still given chance - by ordinary, hard working, responsible people.
I doubt there is ANY part of the Earth that boasts such a work ethic as Sweden, Denmark, Iceland, Norway and Finland.
The only part of the world that can compete is Eastern Europe (and hardly surprising, the economic development of this part of Europe is a completely different story compared to Germany, France and Italy - the sick core of a magnificent, giant economy).
Here is a better discussion of Sweden’s living conditions compared to the USA that came out of the Swedish Institute of Trade. Also, if Sweden was were to be measured by the same standards that it is used in the USA, 40% of Swedes would be considered “low income”. http://www.mises.org/story/955
Sweden: Poorer Than You Think
One of the enduring myths of the “Third Way” welfare state is that a nation as a whole can have a high standard of living—even if no one really has to work—as long as government transfers massive amounts of wealth from those who are well off to those who are less well off. For the past four decades, we have been inundated with news stories, books, and public commentary, all of which have exhorted us to be like Sweden.
The Swedes, we have been told, enjoy free medical care, generous welfare benefits, time off from work, and subsidies for just about everything. When one counters that Swedes pay enormously high taxes, the standard reply is, “That is true, but look at what they receive for their payments.”
According to a recent study, however, the cat is out of the bag. Relative to household in the United States, Swedish family income is considerably less. In fact, the study concludes, average income in Sweden is less than average income for black Americans, which comprise the lowest-income socioeconomic group in this country.
The research came from the Swedish Institute of Trade, which, according to Reuters, “compared official U.S. and Swedish statistics on household income as well as gross domestic product, private consumption and retail spending per capita between 1980 and 1999.”
The study used “fixed prices and purchasing power parity adjusted data,” and found that “the median household income in Sweden at the end of the 1990s was the equivalent of $26,800, compared with a median of $39,400 for U.S. households.” Furthermore, the study points out that Swedish productivity has fallen rapidly relative to per capital productivity in the USA.
In defense of the Swedes, let me first say that simple comparisons of income can be deceiving. While I have never been to Sweden (even though I have relatives there), I would think that even the poorest sections of Stockholm and other Swedish cities are more livable and attractive than what one finds in many U.S. cities. Even with the high taxes, I think I would rather live in downtown Stockholm than in downtown Detroit or Newark.
However, the study alerts us to something that is much more important, and that is that the European welfare states are not making their citizens wealthier. Over time, the cracks in these relatively wealthy nations are growing larger, and if the disease is not arrested, much of Europe will tumble off into real poverty in the not-so-distant future. Europeans—and, most likely, Americans—seem destined to learn the hard way that large, seemingly intractable welfare systems have their way of destroying the Goose that Laid the Golden Eggs.
While people can debate the present condition of Swedes in Stockholm versus blacks in Harlem, there is a deep issue here that people seem to forget when it comes to welfare states: they are destructive at their roots. Advocates of welfarism concentrate only upon distribution while vilifying production. Such a state of affairs cannot go on forever as governments are forced to cannibalize their own capital structure over time in order to make the system to continue to work.
The premises of the welfare state are as follows: (1) free markets, if not regulated by the state, lead to continuing inequality, as wealth becomes increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few people, while more and more people become poorer; (2) the only way to combat this problem is for the state to take a large portion of earnings from the wealthy and distribute it among others; and (3) such distribution actually enables the economy to grow, since growing concentration means that fewer people will have the ability to consume the products that are created within a private-market system.
Karl Marx developed the first premise into his theories, calling this the “internal contradiction” of capitalism. However, the statement contains its own internal contradictions, as it creates an impossible scenario.
As Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard have pointed out, in a private-market society, individuals cannot gain wealth unless they produce goods that are demanded by large numbers of people. For example, it was Henry Ford who became rich producing cars, not the producers of early luxury automobiles that were accessible only to the wealthiest people in American society. Ford developed a method in which he could create cars that most people could afford, yet keep his costs low enough to where he could still make a profit. The most successful producers in our economy have been those people who make goods accessible to people across all socioeconomic levels.
Wal-Mart, which is another example, became the largest corporation in this country—and one of the most successful—by creating a retail system that would enable large numbers of people to conveniently do their shopping. In fact, Wal-Mart began its route to success by building discount stores in rural areas and small towns that were shunned by larger department stores and enterprises like the now-bankrupt Kmart.
Therefore, it seems that if producers are becoming wealthier, it can only occur if consumers are purchasing on a large scale what the the producers are producing. The first statement justifying the welfare state does not have a good causal mechanism, for it does not explain how this transfer of wealth from poor to rich takes place, especially since it makes the implicit assumption that the voluntary purchase of goods is actually a wealth transfer. Such a statement turns the age-old theory of exchange—that economic exchanges create mutual beneficiaries—upon its head.
If anything, wealth transfers inhibit economic growth, not increase it. For one, it violently penalizes entrepreneurs for being successful. By accusing those who create wealth of actually being the ones who destroy wealth, welfarists do violence to language itself. If enough people are punished for creating wealth, less wealth will be created in the future. The more government impedes the creation and distribution of wealth, the less that will be created, which means that those people who are on the margins—that is, those who are less productive—are the first to be hurt. Thus, the welfare state actually makes the poor worse off in the long run.
This notion that the welfare state actually “helps” an economy is also bogus. As I stated earlier, consumption of goods must first take place before producers can reap the rewards from creating them. Furthermore, welfare regimes that attack business enterprises by confiscating their profits also impede future capital formation.
This became quite apparent to me in 1982 when I went to Central Europe, including what was then East Berlin, the capital of the former communist East Germany. While East Berlin was likened to being the “Paris” of the then-communist world, it was more like a huge time warp in which one was placed back in 1948. The entire city was shabby, and what new construction there was had the appearance and attractiveness of a typical American public housing project.
While the western portion of Germany was better kept and more modern than its eastern counterpart, it was still like traveling back to the 1960s. West Germany had a well-developed welfare state by then, having shunned its earlier model as an engine of free enterprise. A close friend who is a dentist brought this point home to me.
Like other medical care, dentistry in Germany is run on socialist principles. That means that individuals do not pay directly for dental (or medical) care, which is provided by the state. My friends, who were vacationing in Germany, visited a number of dental offices and found that the facilities looked like dentist offices in the United States four decades ago. In other words, the German dentists are still depending upon old capital.
One of the worst aspects of socialism, economically speaking, is that it has the perverse tendency to turn new capital from an asset—as is the case in a free-market economy—into a liability. German dentists have no incentive to purchase more modern equipment, since it is expensive and patients have nowhere else to go. In fact, wherever socialist medicine has been practiced for a long time, one can readily see deterioration of capital stock.
For many years, Sweden, like its European counterparts, has been eating its capital stock instead of replenishing it. Some high-profile Swedish companies like Volvo have been able to remain well capitalized, but even those companies are now finding it more attractive to locate in other nations, where their profits are not so readily confiscated.
The Swedes and other northern Europeans are somewhat lucky in that they have had a relatively high standard of living. People in southern European nations like Italy and Spain—where high taxes and vast regulatory agencies abound—find themselves to be much poorer and with no prospects of real improvement.
Unfortunately, many Europeans (like our Canadian neighbors) believe that a vast welfare apparatus makes them morally superior to nations that do not have the same scope of benefits. (While one can point out that the United States has a huge welfare bureaucracy itself, it does not offer the same “generous,” long-term benefits of the European states.) While they prattle on about their moral superiority and their egalitarianism, however, something else is happening. They are slowly becoming poorer and poorer, and the welfare state cannot save them. It can only accelerate their downward slide.
William Anderson, an adjunct scholar of the Mises Institute, teaches economics at Frostburg State University. Send him MAIL. See his Mises.org Articles Archive.
“Sorry, there have been a number of articles published coming out of Sweden that show statistics that Sweden’s average standard of living is slightly lower than the standard of living of the average black in the USA.”
- I too believe the average Swedish family lives in a house built of toilet paper and drive around in a 20 year old chevy.
However, what ought to interest us is what money actually can BUY in the US compared to Sweden.
I claim the best way of deciding whether Swedes or Americans enjoy the highest standard of living here on Earth is reached by traveling around vastly in both of these countries and forming an impression of your own.
However, I use the word “capitalism” above pretty much like anyone would use the expression “entrepreneurship”.
My basic point is that entrepreneurship and economical self-reliance is MORE firmly rooted in Scandinavian culture than in others.
This is a key explanation behind the fact that the Scandinavian countries (25 million inhabitants all in all) has 69 companies on the Forbes Global 2000 list while Germany (housing a population of 82 million) - a former victim of Feudalism, Communism and Nazism - only has 57.
Interesting that Hong Kong at the bottom and China at the top of the scale were not combined for an average score. They are both the same country, albeit Hong Kong is treated differently than the mainland.
160.0 Mainland
43.5 Hong Kong
Average: 101.75
That would put China (combined) lower in the misery ranking than the U.S.A. (115.7).
That is where my ancestor came from -- Timen Stiddem, ship's doctor for the Kalmar Nyckel (containing the colonizers of New Sweden, or Delaware) back in 1638. His dad, Luloff Stiddem, was the first known minister of commerce for Gothenburg. I may be the only person on the planet who cares about this; but I think it's really cool.
Statistics is sometimes useful, but most often it is all nonsense.
From what I’ve understood of the English language, “Misery” means material poverty.
Sweden has been rated “the least poor country” on Earth.
In this case, UN made the evaluation. I agree they are PC and all that, but seriously where does REAL poverty exist in Sweden?
Ok, I admit it existed at least to a certain extent some years ago in Rosengård, a Muslim slum in Malmö, but does ANYONE think this has got ANYTHING to do with how average Swedes live?? (The immigrant unemployment rate mentioned is incorrect because these reporters confuse Rosengård, a small part of Malmö, with that of the immigrant population of Malmö as a whole, but this clip still sheds light on a severe problem few Swedish PC politicians dare to confront).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=byQD8VPhvdM
Living cost are much higher in the Sweden than in the USA. Even with the lower US$, American pay a much lower percentage of their paycheck for things like food and housing. When I travel to Sweden and Denmark I can't believe how high the prices are for hotels and restaurants. Also, things like liquor and petro prices are incredible.
And, further to the standard of living, the weather in Sweden is awful, except for about two months of summer (if you have a really good summer!)
There is a reason why more Swedes live outside Sweden than actually live in Sweden. If you subtract Muslim and Eastern European immigration, there is actually a net loss each year to people leaving Sweden to live in other countries.
So you think the average black American lives in a house made of toilet paper and drives a 20-yr old Chevy? I know you’re exaggerating, but you’re still falling for leftist propaganda.
Wouldn't the test would be who owns the stock, not where they are headquartered?
- You're not. In fact, there are thousands and yet thousands of people who find these things interesting.
Sweden was one of the European countries who took part in colonizing North America. This historical fact is often overlooked, even here in Scandinavia.
This accomplishment by a small nation, that also was very poor at that time, goes hand in hand with the founding of Gothenburg. The struggle of colonizing America and the establishment of a port city on the Swedish West Coast north of Copenhagen was a bold one.
Simultaneously as Sweden was successful in these two endeavors, we also managed to lay siege to most of what today is called “Germany” for 15 years, but something that is of much more importance is the fact that Sweden secured the position of Lutheranism in Northern Europe.
Swedish Vikings founded the nation of Russia, yes, but crushing the corrupted Catholic/Habsburg movement of the 17th century is probably the most important thing my forebears have done so far throughout history.
“So you think the average black American lives in a house made of toilet paper and drives a 20-yr old Chevy?”
- Not all of course, but the kind of poverty you find in places like the south of US (been there, even though it was some time ago) doesn’t exist in Sweden.
It’s not about color of skin, about Capitalism or Socialism, it’s about getting rid of useless, outdated patterns of Feudalism that don’t belong in an advanced Capitalist society.
“I know you’re exaggerating, but you’re still falling for leftist propaganda.”
- Is this article I wrote some months ago based on reality or “leftist propaganda”??:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1951658/posts
A Swedish politician was visiting the United States. He noted to his host, “America has so many poor people”. “Yes, we do, but please note that few if any are from Swedish ancestry”.
I agree with everything you’re saying.
Scandinavia is indeed expensive compared to the US.
However, especially in Sweden, most families can afford a standard of living that few people in the US or the rest of Europe or elsewhere can afford.
Do you wish to deny the fact that AN AVERAGE Swedish family owns:
- A well built house in the city/A nice apartment/Condo
- A well built summer house
- A nice powerboat/sailing yacht
- A Volvo V70/SAAB 9-5/Audi A6
From what I’ve understood, All Swedes don’t enjoy this, but the vast majority does.
Americans are better off than Europeans in general, but my conclusion is that Swedish standard of living can compete with that of other rich countries like the US, Norway and Switzerland.
“Winning” this game isn’t important as such, but economics is an important aspect of building true civilization and therefore we OUGHT to compare our own accomplishments as countries to those of other ones in the pursuit of national success.
Certain things I write about Scandinavian prosperity here might annoy some Americans, but I certainly do not mean any disrespect. One of the most impressive aspects of the US is, by all means, the standard of living. Europe in general has a lot to learn from the US in this respect.
However, competition is often something very constructive.
Without the presence of Lexus, BMW, Audi etc, the average Volvo would probably be something resembling a Toyota Corolla.
“I’ll paraphrase a famous quote, because I don’t recall the exact words;
A Swedish politician was visiting the United States. He noted to his host, “America has so many poor people”. “Yes, we do, but please note that few if any are from Swedish ancestry”.”
- That’s a good point, but does it really end there?
How come several people that have failed to establish a normal, productive life in their own home countries have managed to do so in Sweden?
In the US, this isn’t exactly unusual. A lot of immigrants to the US have become very, very successful like we all know.
But why is there still poverty in America?
Because there should be!!
Sweden promotes the idea of the nanny state. We are used to this societal concept, it has disadvantages but still we manage to compete on markets worldwide.
USA is based on something called LIBERTY and I, sincerely, hope Americans will continue to promote this noble ideal, because if you all of a sudden would start talking about “becoming Scandinavian”, I would declare all of you insane and then shoot myself in any part of my body where it would cause a lot of inconvenient pain.
Back in 1970 the US was way in front of our country when it comes to livingstandard, but now the opposite is true.
Ayn Rand was smart enough to know you not only need a John Galt, but you need a Ragnar Danneskjöld to kick ass.
Oh, and a smart, hot babe to keep everyone motivated.
Your post is pretty funny.
Come to think of it, Ragnar was Norwegian.
As was Warren Zevon’s Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner.
The truth can be funny some times. I know what people on my age earn in the US. From my calculations average hourly wage for a full time employee in Norway is around $43 and is expected to increase by as much as 6% this year.
I am 31 years old and own 2 houses. Still I have money left and I live on a little bit lower than average wage in Norway.
Please explain whats so funny about my post. If you look at the CIA fact book etc you will see that health care in the US is very expensive.
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