Sweden Privatizes While United States Socializes

As the liberals running our federal government in Washington D.C. fall all over themselves in their zeal to plunge the United States into socialist mediocrity, we are beginning to observe socialist nations actually waking up and starting to move away from this dead-end philosophy.

As we saw on John Stossel’s recent expose on Canadian government health care, the debacle  in that country has caused them to start moving back toward privatized health care.  People are just getting tired of waiting months or years to see a doctor for their health care needs.

Not too terribly long ago, socialists in the United States were holding up socialist Sweden’s government health care system (after a cold bucket of reality alerted the people to the fact that the socialist utopias in Canada and Great Britain weren’t so utopian after all) as a model.  But we have since seen that Sweden’s socialized health care suffers from the same problems that afflict all socialist systems.

In an article by Anita Raghavan a few months ago in Forbes, we learn the Swedes are throwing off the crust and shackles of socialism and are moving back toward the free market and smaller government:

Since sweeping to power in 2006, Reinfeldt’s center-right Alliance has been shrinking Sweden’s welfare state. The government is resisting calls to rescue its struggling auto industry. To hear Borg tell it, his government isn’t inspired by coldhearted Darwinism but by cold, hard evidence that the easier the state makes life for people, the easier they take it.

Sweden has long had among the most lavish unemployment benefits in the OECD, and when Borg’s Alliance came to power one-quarter of Swedes were subsisting on the government dole through unemployment or sickness benefits. That figure is now down to 20%. As part of its makeover, the government tightened sickness and unemployment benefits to strip Swedes of some of the world’s highest sickness absentee rates (40.2 days yearly when Borg’s government came into power, 34.6 days now).

Borg’s prescription for growth is simple: cut taxes. His government has slashed the tax rate on low incomes from 30.7% to 17.1%. The combined tax take (national and local; income and other) has fallen by 2.5 percentage points in three years to 46.6% of gross domestic product.

But that’s not all. Sweden is looking at cutting (gasp) taxes that stick it to the evil rich, and even (double-gasp) doing a little health care privatization:

Among other tax cuts: Reinfeldt has done away with a wealth tax and cut corporate and property taxes. Those are on top of the Social Democrats’ elimination of inheritance taxes before Borg came to power, as well as investment of a portion of the state’s pension assets in the stock market–something reminiscent of George W. Bush’s failed attempt to reform Social Security.

As the U.S. takes over some corporations outright, and offers others financial lifelines, Sweden is unloading scores of industries. It is selling state-owned pharmacies and plans to put its remaining 37% stake in telecom incumbent TeliaSonera on the block when market prices improve. Last spring it unloaded Absolut Vodka. A distillery, Borg notes drily, is not a core function for either a welfare state or a night watchman’s state.

Swedish health care is getting a whiff of free marketeering, too. The government’s abolition of the “Stop Law” is expected to give a green light to hospital privatization, and starting next year local authorities will have to offer private primary care options.

The article also points out that the Swedes are concerned that their debt is 57% of GDP; meanwhile, in the U.S. our debt is expected to roughly equal GDP by next year.

I intend to offense to Sweden here, but if they can figure it out, why can’t we here in the United States?  Why can’t we peer over the cliff the Swedes (and the Canadians, and the British, et al) jumped off, see their damaged and broken bodies, and get the clue that maybe we shouldn’t jump off the same cliff???

I’ve never supported Obama’s “Apology Tour” for American “arrogance,”  but are American socialists really arrogant enough to believe that we can succeed in making socialism work where every other country in the world throughout history has failed?

Talk about hubris…

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