Republicans & Conservatives: Archives

Jack,

The question should be, how big is the pie really, and who gets the last piece?

How long can the world wide rate of expansion be sustained?

Shri Lanka took the biggest hit, that wouldn’t be because of the tsunammi would it?

Who is going to start the next war with the intention of kick starting their economy?

Are we one more global catastrophe away from going into the toilet?

I am interested to see how and for what my colleagues on the left end will find to blame George Bush.

Speaking from the left, I personally don’t blame Bush for the U.S.’s position. What I am curious about, however, is how the right explains how a country with a very heavy social welfare economy (aka Democratic Socialism) can beat us. Thoughts?

J. Anthony Matel,

Hooray for G.W.
This must mean he’s doing a great job.
Bush supporters are getting desperate.

Jack,

This list is a great advertisement for European welfare states. Sweden, which has among the highest marginal tax rates in the world, is #3!

You guys are so partisan.

In this post I am not defending George Bush or the Republicans. I am just pointing out the success of our United States of America. I am also showing that there are many ways to success with a basically free market system.

As for the social welfare states, I lived in Scandinavia. It is not like liberal Democrats think. There is a lot of personal responsibility enforced by strong social norms. It is like living in a small town. The system has worked for them because of their homogenous societies.

They are just honest. As late as 1989 in Norway they sometimes moved money from bank to bank in city buses. Nobody robbed them. Our society is a little different. If a hurricane hit Oslo, nobody would steal anything and it is even unlikely most people would raise their voices.

There are also costs in terms of personal autonomy and the choices you can reasonably make. Anyone who lived in rural Minnesota or Wisconsin would recognize the system. It is cultural, not economic.

Another interesting permutation is that individual taxes are high, but taxes on business and capital gains are low (zero). The systems are just different.

The U.S. is a very large and diverse place. None of the other top ten are in the same category. We can’t have some of the things they have just like New York can’t run the same as Wausaw, Wisconsin.

America is nothing if not competitive. It truly is a competitive sports culture, pitting every possible adversary against every other possible adversary. Religions against each other and non-religious, partisans against partisans, wealthy against poor, business against labor, producers against consumers, nations against nations, whites against non-whites, and the list goes on…. I am shocked we are not in first place.

As for the social welfare states, I lived in Scandinavia. It is not like liberal Democrats think. There is a lot of personal responsibility enforced by strong social norms. It is like living in a small town. The system has worked for them because of their homogenous societies.

Actualy, liberal democrats used to learn a lot from Scandinavia. Hubert Humphrey was friends with people like Tage Erlander, Sweden’s Social Democratic Prime Minister from abt. 1945 until abt. 1968. But, unfortunately, “socialism” (even the democratic variety practiced in Western Europe) became such a bad word that the only things we could import from Scandinavia was cheese, cars, and furniture. Certainly not ideas, which Scandinavians are very good at.

Yes Jack, you are right. There are lots of cultural differences, and you can see their influence in parts of the United States, like Minnestoa and Wisconsin (the two states with election day voter-registration!). And yes, there is a lot of personal responsability, but there is also a lot of governmental responsability. I would argue that one important difference between the United States and Scandinavia is that Scandinavians typically are more respectful of their government than Americans typically are — on the left and right.

SteveK

P.S. I lived there too

Jack,
> You guys are so partisan

Yeah, like Ronnie Earle who has indicted 12 Democrats and 4 Republicans.

You brought up the ranking, so it’s only fair to look at Finland’s success. Sure, things are different in Scandinavia, but there are good aspects to the social order there that we ought to be trying to emulate, not make impossible.

Jack,

Your description of Scandinavia is quite at odds with what CONSERVATIVES think. High taxes and social safety nets are supposed to make people lazy and irresponsible.

It’s not a global village.
It’s really global pillage.
Nations should beware of those that would exploit them.
The U.S. has a long history of doing just that.
Capitalism, entrepreneurship, free markets, and such are all fine, but capitalism gone wrong leads to corpocrisy, corporatism, corporate influence on government, exploitation, and other abuses.

I am interested to see how and for what my colleagues on the left end will find to blame George Bush.

then….

You guys are so partisan. In this post I am not defending George Bush or the Republicans.

Jack, if you don’t want partisan replies, don’t ask for them outright. Even your “non-partisan” posts always seem to have a backhand slap at democrats in them.

Woody, Steve et al

I don’t want this to become a esoteric discussion of Scandinavia, but I do believe we are dealing more with culture than economics. They are more respectful of government; that is true. It is also true that they can’t sue the way we do. But you have to remember the homogeneity and the small size of their societies. They cooperate. And this has a very long history. You find it goes back a thousand years and has persisted through a variety of political and economic systems.

There were (are) a lot of things I admire about Scandinavians, but things always have up and down sides. They just behave more reasonably. If everyone behaves like an average Scandinavian, you just don’t have much poverty. (Just as in America, if you work, get and stay faithfully married and don’t abuse drugs or alcohol, it is almost impossible to remain poor.) If you transferred the system they have in Louisiana to Norway, pretty soon the corruption would diminish and things would start to run well. If you transferred the Norwegian system to New Orleans, pretty soon the welfare system would be overloaded and collapsing. Behavior matters.

I remember aftermath of a big blizzard that had trapped dozens of people in the open. The weatherman had failed to predict it. People dug little holes in the snow, hunkered down and survived for a couple of days. When the authorities came to get them (along with the news media) I remember one guy crawling out of his snow hole. The newsman asked if he was worried that they wouldn’t find him. He very calmly replied that he knew they would find him, but he was a little worried that he wouldn’t be alive by the time they did. Then he walked off. None of this complaining we hear from our own guys. No lawsuit. A good sense of humor after three days in the snow. I wish we were more like that, but we are not.

Norway was #1 again this year by a UN report

Jack,

I thought the question at hand was economics, but if you want to talk about culture — maybe Scandinavians don’t steal because they don’t feel desperate enough. Just a crazy left-wing theory…

Scandinavians don’t steal because they don’t need to. They get free education, housing, medical and even transportation. You can have pot or orgies in your house.

Jack:

You forgot to compare the levels of poverty between Norway and the US.

I agree. In Scandinavia they have health care, and standardized education through collage. In the US if you are poor, then you can’t afford collage to get a better job, and stay poor. Or if you are rich you can go to Yale AND Harvard on nothing and get all kinds of jobs handed to you. This system is not fair. That is why there is such a wide class devide in the US. That is why people steal.

Woody and Aldous

Actually those are crazy theories.

We sort of drifted into the Scandinavian thing. I let it happen. But it is clear that you can’t separate economics and culture. Culture helps determine behaviors and behaviors determine outcomes. We Americans should know that better than anyone else. We can see different groups of immigrants having very different experiences even when they start out equally poor.

Scandinavians have been law abiding for centuries. They only stopped being poor recently. In the early part of the 20th Century, the region still experienced periodic famines.

Crime is related to poverty, but I am not sure of the direction of causality. Maybe dishonesty and crime cause poverty. I am convinced that corrupt countries are poor because of their corruption and not corrupt because they are poor. If money was enough to make you rich, countries with resouces would be the best off. It seems the opposite is true. And you can certainly be poor and never be criminal.

And if poverty causes crime and crime rates have been dropping since 1990 (and continued to drop since 2000), what does that do to your life is getting worse ideas?

I think you have to look to cultural factors in crime. The economic explanations just don’t correlate very well.

Returning to the original economic idea, however, the U.S. does very well in the ranking. It beats the Scandinavian countries. Finland, BTW, is not Scandinavian. It is a technicality, but it is true. If you know Norwegian, you can easily read Danish and understand Swedish. Finnish isn’t even in the same language family.

Jack,

What is really interesting about Finnland is that from the end of WW2 until recently it was alligned with the Soviet Union, but still maintained a market economy.

Jack,

The fact that Finland isn’t really “Scandinavian” is important only to you, Jack. My point was that welfare states like Sweden, Finland, and Denmark (#4) are kicking butt in these rankings. You say its their culture. Actually you seem to be saying that people in Louisiana are morally inferior to Scandinavians. An interesting argument to read in the Right column!!!

It’s sort of like we are talking about baseball, and I observe that the #1, #3, and #4 best teams in the league (by some impartial ranking) all have good pitching (as measure by, say, earned runs) and relatively poor hitting. You say note that they are all in the Northeast and are steeped in tradition. I can’t really prove you wrong, but at least I am the one talking about the mechanics of baseball.

Woody

The ranking indicates that the Nordics (which includes Finland) are doing very well. It also indicates that the U.S. is doing better than most of them. As I wrote in my intro, that there are many ways that a good market economy can work.

My other observation is about the types of places that are in the top ten besides the U.S. They are – all of them – smaller homogenous places.

Only the U.S. has managed to combine the effectiveness of a small homogenous country with the diversity of a big one. That is actually a more interesting lesson. Something the U.S. is doing is working and it is working well.

I drifted into behaviors of various peoples and the systems they live under. Culture matters. I know it is unpopular to say the out loud, but it is close to a tautology. You could not apply a Swedish style system to most of the U.S. because it relies on a whole package of social and cultural mores that are different from ours.

It gives government significant power over individuals. In a place like Scandinavia - where being called “unreasonable” is a big insult - it works and is not much abused. In Louisiana, where civic corruption is legendary, such a system wouldn’t last ten minutes. On the other hand, food is better there.

I have given up using the word moral when describing cultures. But let’s say behaviors and the resulting outcomes are different among different cultures. Some can make better food; others more effective government.

Rocky
Finland was aligned with the Soviets in a very interesting ways. During the Cold War, it was pretty much a given that the Red Army would not be able to cross Finland safely in the event of war. The Finns played a very good game with the Soviets, but they certainly were not willing players. With friends like that …

Beyond that, the more and globalized competitive places are usually better places to live.

I guess cross-checking latest WFE’s Global Competitiveness Report with latest UN’s Human Development Report could be interesting too.

My less and less competitive (30th) old France is better ranked (16rh) as a place to live than, for example, Malaysia, a better competitive country (24th) but way worse (61th) place to be…
Not time yet for me to move away to another country, thought.

Alas, both reports confirms how poor Africa really is…

Excellent article, Jack. You’re absolutely right. If we want to be number one, we need to be more like Finland!

:)

AP

Personally, l like places like Finland and Norway. I would rather walk in the woods than most other things and that is easier to do there. I lived in Norway four years. About half the expats loved it; the other half hated it. There was not much middle ground. I was happy there. But we can’t be more like them, however, because of our size and diversity.

Philippe

I didn’t make the correlation clear. There is an intermediate step. Both being a good place to live and competitiveness are positively correlated with globalization. It does not mean that every country corresponds directly. It is just that competitiveness (we are talking about ability to support business, not competition among individuals BTW) and globalization make a place nicer to live in general.

There is also a globalization index available. On this, France is 18 and Malaysia is 19, if that makes you feel better.

Everyone would want to live in France. It is a beautiful place with a very high quality of life. The problem is establishing business there. It may be a tradeoff you want to make. People have choices, but each choice has a variety of outcomes.

I don’t know a tremendous amount about Finland, but I would hazard a guess that they don’t have a good percentage of the population harboring a bias against education and achievement.

The Fins probably don’t waste resources constructing entire industries for the purpose of making excuses for people who refuse to take advantage of the opportunites before them.

Or political parties that make mascots out of racial minorities for the purpose of cynical political gain (and without regard for the damage this does to said mascots).

Yes, we could learn a lot from the Fins.

Jack wrote:

Everyone would want to live in France. It is a beautiful place with a very high quality of life. The problem is establishing business there.

Can you elaborate on this? I’ve read that starting businesses there is in some ways easier than the US. For example, you don’t have to look for and purchase health insurance for your employees because they are all already covered.

Steve

You haven’t read that by anyone who actually tried to set up a business in Europe. There is a lot of loose talk by people speaking hypothetically with political motivation.

France is a decent place to invest in established business, precisely because competition from new entrants is more difficult. All life is tradeoff.

As for the health care, when you start a business, you probably don’t have many employees. And you are not required to provide health insurance in any case for a small number of employees.

In France, there is very little labor mobility and it is nearly impossible to fire someone. That is why firms hesitate to hire. A startup business may not be able to guarantee employment. It will have trouble meeting all the regulations. That is why it is hard to set up a business. That is also one reason that unemployment is around 10% and has been that high for many years.

Our unemployement rate hovers around 5% and many people consider that too high. We also have a lot fewer long-term unemployed among them.

Jack,

There is also a globalization index available. On this, France is 18 and Malaysia is 19, if that makes you feel better.

Hardly, but thanks.
:-)

In France, there is very little labor mobility and it is nearly impossible to fire someone.

Fire someone is costly but not impossible anymore these days.

Mobility is a big issue indeed. Many are not ready to move, that’s right. The youngest are more.
But even when you *want* to move, like I recently did, it’s often very hard because of bureaucracy and costs induced (bank/water/electricity/phone/ISP/cable accounts closing costs).
In a such small landscape, it’s really something we should fix in the future…

That is why it is hard to set up a business. That is also one reason that unemployment is around 10% and has been that high for many years.

More and more unemployed french are in fact seniors. And because of hirers’s youth addiction, nobody wants, even if many are well experienced and motivated candidates.
I think it’s around 30% of unemployed seniors. Don’t think being senior start at 60+ here in France. No, french company considers you’re (too) old when you hit around 45-50 here. :-(

I’m only 36, but I’m working in IT industry and it’s even worst there. At 40, you’re too old in this sector.
Well, I guess “too old” = “too costly” in their mind. Experience is no more valued in moderm business, because most of them focus only on short term.

Middle class’s disapearing. Now, middle age workers too.

How sad.

Thanks, Phillpe

We Americans like to bash the French. It seems that you French return the favor. The fact is that both our countries are good places to live most of the time and both are wrestling with problems about how to make our countries better for the people who live there. We have different challenges and have made different choices. Some work out better than others. We have to change constantly to keep up.