53 Responses to “La vie sans le capitalisme”

1. lemoutongris dit :

   22 octobre 2012 à 15 h 32 min

   exagération! démagogie! mensonge!!!

   quoi d’autre?

   Sérieusement : le capitalisme est la base-même de notre civilisation. Sans lui (et donc, sans échanges volontaires et droits de propriétés protégés), on ne serait pas là
2. respectable dit :

   22 octobre 2012 à 16 h 52 min

   Les rouges adorent le niveau de vie capitaliste conditionnellement à ce qu’ils n’aient pas à aller travailler. Faudrait que la maison et la mercedes viennent avec le système.
3. Hourst dit :

   22 octobre 2012 à 19 h 47 min

   Masturbation idéologique.
4. GNDpiss dit :

   23 octobre 2012 à 10 h 27 min

   Merveilleux ce vidéo!!! Il reproduit exactement la situation d’esclave d’un citoyen de l’ex-URSS. Demandez maintenant à un Russe s’il s’ennuie du communisme, des dictateurs sanguinaires qui mènent de gros trains de vie, de la pauvreté etc. 99% des réponses sera NON. Depuis que Reagan a fait sauté la tyrannie soviétique, la Russie s’est modernisée en un rien de temps. Moscou est aujourd’hui la plus grosse ville d’Europe avec des quartiers propres et branchés et le pays est en ce moment le plus prospère du monde grace aux entrepreneurs, au GAZ DE SCHISTE, au pétrole et à leur taux d’imposition UNIQUE de 15%.

   Bref tout cela pour dire que GAUCHE=ÉCHEC, TYRANNIE, PAUVRETÉ ET IMMOBILISME et que les exemples ne manque pas: URSS, Mao, Castro, Chavez, Mitterand, Porcine Marois… Les bolcheviques qui prônent l’abolition du capitalisme comme Jean-Luc Melenchon ou Khadir sont des tarés
5. Alex dit :

   23 octobre 2012 à 11 h 17 min

   C’est drole, on parle toujours d’ideologie quand ca vient de la droite… Et puis vivre systematiquement au dessus de nos moyens en filant la note a nos enfants et trouver que c’est normal, c’est pas ideologique, ca?

   Gauche = caricatures imparfaites d’etres humains
6. Martin Bérubé dit :

   23 octobre 2012 à 12 h 11 min

   Vraiment n’importe quoi…

   Hourst tu as le commentaire le plus juste…
7. Michel Viger dit :

   23 octobre 2012 à 16 h 14 min

   Le capitalisme est à la base de l’exploitation de l’humain par l’humain, dans un modàle qui en plus confere aux  héritiers un sentiment encore plus grand d’une supposé supériorité qui le reste parce que soumise a aucun controle démocratique…
8. David dit :

   23 octobre 2012 à 23 h 42 min

   Vraiment n’importe quoi…

   Hourst tu as le commentaire le plus juste…

   Tes arguments sont tout aussi fort que ceux de Hourst…
9. David dit :

   23 octobre 2012 à 23 h 47 min

   Le capitalisme est à la base de l’exploitation de l’humain par l’humain

   Non, ça c’est le socialisme.

   Le capitalisme c’est une transaction volontaire entre deux individus où chacun y trouve un avantage.
10. Occam dit :

    24 octobre 2012 à 10 h 34 min

    Le mot clé est VOLONTAIRE.

    Intrésequement le capitalisme c’est avoir confiance à l’humain et le socialisme c’est nié l’humain pour le collectif.

    J’ai choisit mon camp.
11. Malaf dit :

    24 octobre 2012 à 10 h 57 min

    «Le capitalisme c’est une transaction volontaire entre deux individus où chacun y trouve un avantage.»

    Non. Ça c’est le commerce. Le capitalisme est l’accumulation de capital. Essaie de maîtriser tes concepts si tu veux être pris au sérieux. 
12. Martin Bérubé dit :

    24 octobre 2012 à 12 h 53 min

    Fine,

    Le capitalisme, je suis bien d’accord avec ça, mais le vidéo est vraiment tiré par les cheveux…

    Et de toute façon, peu importe le système, des échanges volontaires entre deux individus où chacun y trouve son avantage se feront… et dans chaque système, des gens ambitionneront et abuseront du système, ce fut vrai pour les bolchéviques et pour les rois européens, c’est vrai pour les castristes et les communistes chinois et c’est vrai aussi dans le système américain ou canadien…  là où il y a de l’homme, il y a de l’hommerie…

    Pour moi le capitalisme est inhérent à la nature, peu importe le système qu’il soit démocratique ou despotique… en URSS, des gens se spécialisaient dans le vol et dans l’acquisition de biens qu’ils échangeaient par la suite…. les bolchéviques avaient le contrôle sur le capital monétaire et technologique, mais pas nécessairement sur le capital humain, social et naturel… une certaine forme de capitalisme émergeait de ce système… Le vidéo le démontre également, malgré que le personnage se retrouve dans un monde sans capitalisme, deux jeunes filles lui volent son porte monnaie, c’est donc qu’il détenait une certaine forme de capital dans son porte monnaie, donc une valeur marchande qui pourrait lui permettre de faire des échanges…

    Pour moi ce n’est capitalisme vs communisme, c’est libéralisme vs contrôle… On ne peut pas être pour ou contre le capitalisme on ne peut que le constater puis le contrôler ou le libéraliser…
13. David dit :

    24 octobre 2012 à 20 h 50 min

    Non. Ça c’est le commerce. Le capitalisme est l’accumulation de capital. Essaie de maîtriser tes concepts si tu veux être pris au sérieux.

    Capitalisme = commerce. Le commerce ne se fait pas sans capital (une évidence…)
14. David dit :

    24 octobre 2012 à 20 h 52 min

    et dans chaque système, des gens ambitionneront et abuseront du système

    Oui et c’est la beauté du système capitaliste. Le vendeur essaye d’abuser, l’acheteur essaye d’abuser et de cela naît un compromis qui plaît À tout le monde.

    Dans les autre système, le monopole de l’abus est détenu par seulement une des parties.
15. Malaf dit :

    24 octobre 2012 à 21 h 19 min

    Le capitalisme est un système économique.

    Pour échanger un poulet contre des flèches (je caricature pour faire simple), pas besoin de mettre en place un système. Et pas besoint de sur-accumuler du capital et de trouver des débouchés pour écouler le surplus.

    Lis un peu sur le sujet, c’est pas la littérature qui manque.

    Le commerce existait bien avant la mise en place du système capitaliste qui a remplacé le système féodal. 
16. Hourst dit :

    24 octobre 2012 à 21 h 53 min

    Le capitalisme, l’équilibre par l’abus. À consommer sans modération!

    Haha, laisse moi rire. Il ne t’es jamais venu à l’idée justement, que le capitalisme bousillait toute notion d’équilibre. Celui qui a l’argent a le pouvoir. Économique, législatif, culturel, éducatif. Les compromis, c’est les pauvres qui les font. t’es naif si tu crois que le pauvre a les moyens « d’abuser »  de qui que ce soit de la même manière qu’un riche ou qu’une corporation. Le capitalisme, c’est le pouvoir entre les mains de personnes morales, immortelles, et très riches. Indique moi comment un individu peut lutter contre ça.

    L’abus est à sens unique, et ça fait longtemps que les populations ont compris que pour s’opposer de façon crédible à cela on avait besoin d’un système politique basé sur la société. T’as au moins raison sur un truc. La vie est basée sur un rapport de force.
17. David dit :

    24 octobre 2012 à 22 h 35 min

    Pour échanger un poulet contre des flèches (je caricature pour faire simple), pas besoin de mettre en place un système. Et pas besoint de sur-accumuler du capital et de trouver des débouchés pour écouler le surplus.

    Dans ton exemple les flèches et le poulet sont du capital.

    #Fail
18. David dit :

    24 octobre 2012 à 22 h 37 min

    Celui qui a l’argent a le pouvoir. Économique, législatif, culturel, éducatif.

    Acheter c’est voter. Même les gauchistes sont d’accord sur ce point.
19. Malaf dit :

    24 octobre 2012 à 23 h 01 min

    «Dans ton exemple les flèches et le poulet sont du capital.»

    Oui, mais il peut y avoir du capital sans capitalisme. Le capital est un produit, le capitalisme est un système.

    Fais un effort de compréhension svp 
20. Joël dit :

    24 octobre 2012 à 23 h 08 min

    Et pas besoint de sur-accumuler du capital et de trouver des débouchés pour écouler le surplus.

    T’es contre l’épargne?

    Ouf, déconnecté le mec. 
21. Joël dit :

    24 octobre 2012 à 23 h 11 min

    L’abus est à sens unique, et ça fait longtemps que les populations ont compris que pour s’opposer de façon crédible à cela on avait besoin d’un système politique basé sur la société.

    Moi je regarde ça et je vais la constatation suivante.

    Plus un pays est capitaliste, moins il y a de pauvres et inversement.

    Simple constatation qui réfute ton affirmation. 
22. Malaf dit :

    25 octobre 2012 à 8 h 55 min

    «T’es contre l’épargne? Ouf, déconnecté le mec.» -Joël

    J’adore ça du monde incapable de saisir le sens de ce qu’on dit.

    Un homme primitif accumule des pommes pour passer l’hiver… il accumule du capital, on s’entend?

    C’est pas pour autant du capitalisme. Merci.     
23. Hourst dit :

    25 octobre 2012 à 12 h 28 min

    Joel,
    et malgré tout la majorité des pays occidentaux, développés et riches, se tournent ou se sont tournés vers des politiques à tendance socialisantes. Suède, Allemagne, France, Canada, Pays-Bas, États-Unis. C’est parce qu’ils ont compris que le capitalisme, l’entreprise privée et les pouvoirs corporatifs avaient besoin d’un contrepoids social pour atteindre l’équilibre entre l’influence des riches et celle des pauvres, et limiter les abus des premiers.

    Ton observation tend à confirmer ce que je dis. Les nations pauvres n’ont pas les ressources pour se prémunir contre les abus du capitalisme des nations riches. L’amérique du Sud, mine de rien, a longtemps été un laboratoire pour les États-Unis. Ne va pas penser que c’est vers le capitalisme qu’ils se sont tournés. Celui des autres, ils y ont gouté. Le problème du cap n,est pas qu’il ne crée pas de richesse, c’est qu’il n’y a aucune parité d’influence entre ceux pour qui ils la crée et ceux qui en sont les victimes.

    On discute d’équilibre, pas de richesse absolue.
24. Hourst dit :

    25 octobre 2012 à 12 h 29 min

    David, tu as l’assurance et l’arrogance des ignorants. C’est pas parce qu’il y a du capital que c’est du capitalisme.
25. Damien King dit :

    25 octobre 2012 à 13 h 12 min

    Moi je regarde ça et je vais la constatation suivante.
    Plus un pays est capitaliste, moins il y a de pauvres et inversement.
    Simple constatation qui réfute ton affirmation. 

    Oui, mais généralement, les gens que tu essaies de convaincre (en vain?) s’en foutent du fait qu’il y ait moins de pauvres. Ils ne veulent qu’empêcher certains de devenir plus riches par leurs innovation, leurs ambitions…et ça revient à «tout le monde pauvre égal» au lieu de «le moins de pauvre possible, avec des très riches».
26. Luc dit :

    25 octobre 2012 à 18 h 49 min

    C’Est quand même pas du un pour un, il doit avoir plus de pauvre au Chilie, en Estonie ou au Pérou qu’en suède

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_economic_freedom

    Aussi des pays très peu libre économiquement (Un certains capitalisme à l’asiatique, Corée, Chine et compagnie) ont connu de beau bon du niveau de vie.
27. Anonyme dit :

    25 octobre 2012 à 19 h 35 min

    le capitalisme, c’est le pouvoir entre les mains de personnes morales, immortelles, et très riches. Indique moi comment un individu peut lutter contre ça

    Facile, tu n’achète pas à l’entreprise que tu n’aimes pas et tu ne travaille pas pour l’entreprise que tu n’aimes pas. À l’opposé dans le socialisme, le monopole de l’État te force à utiliser les services de l’État et à travailler pour lui. Dans ce système, l’État a le monopole de l’abus de pouvoir puisque tout passe par lui. Ce qui les rends immortels et riches c’est la protection directe ou indirecte que l’État leur procure, car sinon ils devraient faire face à la compétition comme tout le monde.
28. Maxim Bernard dit :

    25 octobre 2012 à 19 h 58 min

    @Hourst

    Qui a le pouvoir dans un système capitaliste ? Personne. Tous les acteurs doivent se plier aux lois du marché, même les plus grandes corporations.

    Allons-y avec un exemple. M. Untel, un millionnaire, est à la tête d’une entreprise de production de pommes de terre. Dans le marché, plusieurs entreprises se font concurrence, ce qui fait en sorte que M. Untel ne peut pas fixer librement le prix de ses pommes de terre. Supposons qu’un jour, il décide de vendre ses pommes de terre (exagérons un peu) 10$ le kilo. Que va-t-il arriver ?

    C’est simple : les consommateurs vont cesser de faire affaire avec l’entreprise de M. Untel, car ses pommes de terre sont hors de prix. Et là, les chutes de profits vont s’ensuivre.

    C’est certain que si M. Untel détenait le monopole, il pourrait s’en permettre davantage, mais dans un libre-marché, si monopole il y a, la concurrence peut surgir à tout moment. Par exemple, je pourrais partir ma propre compagnie de pommes de terre en réaction aux prix exhorbitants, ce qui ajouterait de la concurrence. Ensuite, les consommateurs risquent tout bonnement de boycotter M. Untel parce qu’ils vont estimer avoir été floués.

    Ça, ce sont les lois du marché en action.

    En fait, les grandes «personnes morales, immortelles, et très riches» ont très peu de pouvoir. Elles doivent suivre les règles du jeu, sans quoi elles risquent de ne pas apprécier les conséquences. En fait, le capitalisme incite davantage à l’honnêteté que n’importe quel autre système.
29. pat dit :

    25 octobre 2012 à 21 h 17 min

    hourst:

    1 riche qui a une usine de farine, 1 million de pauvres qui ne peuvent pas se payer de la farine.   le riche a du pouvoir? il ne resteras pas riche longtemps.

    alors s’il veut rester riche, il est mieux de ne pas abuser des pauvres.

    tout le monde ont du pouvoir. 
30. David dit :

    25 octobre 2012 à 21 h 30 min

    Best of de Malaf et Hourst sur le capitalisme:

    Oui, mais il peut y avoir du capital sans capitalisme.

    Un homme primitif accumule des pommes pour passer l’hiver… il accumule du capital, on s’entend?

    C’est pas pour autant du capitalisme.

    C’est pas parce qu’il y a du capital que c’est du capitalisme.

    Lâchez pas les gars, mais je suis sûr que vous pouvez encore faire mieux !
31. David dit :

    25 octobre 2012 à 22 h 16 min

    C’Est quand même pas du un pour un, il doit avoir plus de pauvre au Chilie, en Estonie ou au Pérou qu’en suède

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_economic_freedom

    Aussi des pays très peu libre économiquement (Un certains capitalisme à l’asiatique, Corée, Chine et compagnie) ont connu de beau bon du niveau de vie.

    Rigueur avant de faire un commentaire…

    Si tu avais eu de la rigueur, voici ce que tu aurais présenté comme analyse.

    Plus l’indice de liberté économique augmente, plus le niveau de vie s’améliore:

    

    

    Fait à noter, le rapport de l’Institut Fraser nous indique aussi que les écarts de richesse sont les mêmes dans tous les groupes. Donc, peu importe qu’on vive dans une économie socialiste ou une économie capitaliste, il y aura toujours des riches et des pauvres. Par contre, les pauvres du système capitalisme sont beaucoup plus riches que les pauvres du système socialiste.

    Selon la gauche, plus le marché est libre, plus les gens sont exploités et plus la misère est omniprésente. La réalité est pourtant tout autre, le laissez-faire économique se traduit par une augmentation importante du niveau de vie et les pauvres sont les premiers à profiter de la libéralisation de l’économie.

    Source:
    
    Economic Freedom of the World 2009 Annual Report

    Prend des notes et essayes d’être à la hauteur dans tes prochains commentaires.
32. David dit :

    25 octobre 2012 à 22 h 28 min

    Joel,
    et malgré tout la majorité des pays occidentaux, développés et riches, se tournent ou se sont tournés vers des politiques à tendance socialisantes. Suède, Allemagne, France, Canada, Pays-Bas, États-Unis.

    LOL, encore une fois Hourst fait un commentaire qui va regretter !

    L’élection d’Harper a rendu le Canada plus socialiste, vraiment tu te surpasse.

    Par contre je t’accorde que les États-Unis et les Français sont pris avec de la racaille socialiste. C’est pourquoi ces pays sont dans la merde.

    Pour ce qui est des pays scandinaves, je vais te parler de la Suède (je pourrais aussi te parler des pays-bas qui ont récemment ré-élu la droite).

    Sweden hardly a ‘socialist nightmare’
    As Obama tries to rein in Wall Street and raise taxes on the wealthy, critics say he is trying to turn America into Sweden. Meanwhile, in Sweden, it’s full-speed ahead for capitalism.

    Stockholm, Sweden – There is a long tradition of using Sweden as a socialist model to highlight social shortcomings in the United States. Recent tax change proposals by the Obama administration, for instance, had conservative commentator Bill O’Reilly asking his viewers, « Do we really want to change America into Sweden? »

    Yet if the Scandinavian model were shipped across the Atlantic, the changes would have little to do with socialism, say analysts here. In fact, some believe it should be held up as a bastion of market capitalism.

    Last week, the country’s center-right government began selling off state-owned pharmacies, one of the country’s few remaining nationalized companies, as part of an ambitious program of liberal economic reforms started in 2006. In the same week, a study by the Swedish Unemployment Insurance Board revealed that almost half of the country’s jobless lacked full unemployment benefits. Many opted out of the state scheme when the cost of membership was raised last year; others were ineligible.

    State pensions, schools, healthcare, public transport, and post offices have been fully or partly privatized over the last decade, making Sweden one of the most free market orientated economies in the world, analysts say.

    “Sweden has always been on the side of the market economy. This is not socialism,” says Olle Wästberg, director of the Swedish Institute in Stockholm, and a former Consul General to New York. “In many fields, we have more private ownership compared to other European countries, and to America. About 80 percent of all new schools are privately run, as are the railroads and the subway system.”

    Stereotypical images of Sweden as a socialist utopia date back to the 1930s, when a best selling book by Marquis Childs lauded the country as a middle way between capitalism and socialism.

    “Eisenhower also helped to propagate a number of myths in the ’60s when he said that Swedes were ‘addicted to sin, socialism, and suicide,’  » says Brian Palmer, professor of anthropology at Sweden’s Uppsala University (read a past Monitor story on the professor here).

    Images of all three Swedish vices were given a good dusting off and a 21st century remake last month on Jon Stewart’s Daily Show (watch the first part of the report here and the second part here). The hilarious « investigation » into the « socialist nightmare » state revealed that, apart from producing famed meatballs and red gummy fish candy, « socialism has left this population ravaged, dispirited, and hauntingly thin. » The last observation was made as the reporter watched beautiful Swedish women walk down the street.

    Jokes aside, Professor Palmer, who ran a controversial course on globalization at Harvard University from 2000 to 2004, believes that Sweden has been one step ahead of the US in adopting and extending economic reforms.

    “To speak of Sweden as socialist today is pretty far off the mark,” he says. “Neoliberal reforms have gone much further here in some sectors than in the US. Sweden has become a sort of laboratory for privatization in a way that the Heritage Foundation or the American Enterprise Institute could only dream of.”

    Sweden’s secret recipe
    Advice from a successful – and tax-cutting – finance minister

    When Europe’s finance ministers meet for a group photo, it’s easy to spot the rebel — Anders Borg has a ponytail and earring. What actually marks him out, though, is how he responded to the crash. While most countries in Europe borrowed massively, Borg did not. Since becoming Sweden’s finance minister, his mission has been to pare back government. His ‘stimulus’ was a permanent tax cut. To critics, this was fiscal lunacy — the so-called ‘punk tax cutting’ agenda. Borg, on the other hand, thought lunacy meant repeating the economics of the 1970s and expecting a different result.

    Three years on, it’s pretty clear who was right. ‘Look at Spain, Portugal or the UK, whose governments were arguing for large temporary stimulus,’ he says. ‘Well, we can see that very little of the stimulus went to the economy. But they are stuck with the debt.’ Tax-cutting Sweden, by contrast, had the fastest growth in Europe last year, when it also celebrated the abolition of its deficit. The recovery started just in time for the 2010 Swedish election, in which the Conservatives were re-elected for the first time in history.

    All this has taken Borg from curiosity to celebrity. The Financial Times recently declared him the most effective finance minister in Europe. When we meet in his Stockholm office on a Friday afternoon (he and his aide seem to be the only two left in the building) he says he is just carrying on 20 years of reform. ‘Sweden was a textbook case of European economic sclerosis. Very high taxes and huge regulatory burden.’ An economic crisis in the early 1990s forced Sweden on the road to balanced budgets, and Borg was determined the 2007 crash would not stop him cutting the size of government.

    ‘Everybody was told “stimulus, stimulus, stimulus”,’ he says — referring to the EU, IMF and the alphabet soup of agencies urging a global, debt-fuelled spending splurge. Borg, an economist, couldn’t work out how this would help. ‘It was surprising that Europe, given what we experienced in the 1970s and 80s with structural unemployment, believed that short-term Keynesianism could solve the problem.’ Non-economists, he says, ‘might have a tendency to fall for those kinds of messages’.

    He continued to cut taxes and cut welfare-spending to pay for it; he even cut property taxes for the rich to lure entrepreneurs back to Sweden. The last bit was the most unpopular, but for Borg, economic recovery starts with entrepreneurs. If cutting taxes for the rich encouraged risk-taking, then it had to be done. ‘In most cases, the company would not have been created without the owner,’ he says. ‘There would be no Ikea without [Ingvar] Kamprad. We would not have Tetra-Pak without [Ruben] Rausing. They are probably the foremost entrepreneurs we have had in the last few decades, and both moved out of Sweden.’

    But they were not rich, I say, when they were starting out. ‘No, but they were becoming rich. If you have a high wealth tax and an inheritance tax, people emigrate because it becomes too costly to own a company. Ownership is a production factor. Entrepreneurs are a production factor. Yes, these people are rich and you can obviously argue that we want to encourage social cohesion. But it is also problematic if you drive out entrepreneurs from your country, because they are the source of job creation.’

    Just as George Osborne took a hit for reducing the 52p tax to a 47p tax, so Borg’s party paid an political price for helping the rich. ‘If you are going to survive that politically, it is very important to cut taxes on low-income earners.’ He focused the tax credit on the low-paid, giving some the equivalent of a month’s extra salary every year. But there was still resentment. ‘We lost a lot of voters when we cut the property and the wealth tax, I don’t make any excuse for that. It was a severe blow to our support.’

    This is the only time in the interview when Borg speaks like the politician he claims not to be. ‘When I look at other politicians I tend to see myself more as an economist,’ he says. This is true in that he is appointed, not elected, and was chief economist for SEB bank. But before this, he was a young libertarian longing to turn the world upside-down. Internet footage still exists of a denim-clad Borg declaring on television that if he was prime minister he ‘wouldn’t do a damn thing, so the people could do whatever they want’. When he later became a prime ministerial adviser, he caused a stir when it emerged that a government staffer backed drug legalisation.

    When Fredrik Reinfeldt became party leader in 2003, he made Borg his right-hand man. It seemed a gamble at the time, but his faith in Borg’s expertise was absolute — Borg’s views had moderated, but his sense of urgency had not. ‘We came into government in October 2006 and we launched tax cuts in January 2007,’ he says, ‘so the first three months were extremely hectic.’ The Conservatives’ slogan was striking: ‘We are the new workers’ party.’ Tax rates would be cut for workers, and welfare cut to pay for it. High welfare levels, he says, can inflict cruelty in the name of compassion. ‘People emigrate from the labour market. Unemployment traps capture a lot of people in social exclusion.’ Tax cuts are not spoken of as an ideological aim, but as a tool to cut unemployment and advance social justice.

    What even Borg did not expect was that his tax cut for the low-paid would increase economic growth so much that it has almost entirely paid for itself. Borg had created something that Osborne’s critics say does not exist: a self-financing tax cut. ‘There was some criticism at the time that we were borrowing to finance tax cuts,’ he says. But Sweden could do it, because it was expecting to return to surplus soon; Britain has no such luxury, he says. His main advice to Osborne is: ‘Keep on dealing with the deficit, because deficits destroy everything else.’

    Borg and Osborne have a good relationship, as do David Cameron and Reinfeldt (who keep in touch via text message). All are men in their early forties, who pick fights with the old guard of their parties to flaunt their ‘modernising’ credentials. But politics in Britain and Sweden are as different now as they were in the 1980s, except the roles are reversed. Sweden is the unlikely champion of supply-side economics, with ideas too radical for Brits. There is cross-party support in Sweden for profit-seeking state schools, which Michael Gove won’t attempt. Borg’s tax-cutting policy was accompanied by a 268-page book explaining the dynamic link between lower taxes and more jobs. Such a document would be unthinkable from HM Treasury.

    Sound economics is simply a far larger part of the government mission in Sweden than in Britain. Cameron once observed that no one ‘gets up in the morning thinking “I wish the state was smaller”,’ which is perhaps true in Whitehall. But not in Stockholm where, on Reinfeldt’s 45th birthday, Borg presented him with a graph showing Sweden’s tax-to-GDP ratio dipping under the 45 per cent mark for the first time in decades. That is still, of course, one of the highest rates in the world.

    In public, Borg is not in the least triumphalist — if anything, he’s trying to stir up a bit of pessimism. Success has meant he now has to manage expectations, and Borg has taken to warning in his speeches that ‘a future economic crisis is as much a certainty in life as death and taxes’. He could add another certainty: that high taxes will slow down any economic recovery, and fortune tends to favour politicians who do something about that.

    A Swedish Lesson

    To Brits, Sweden with its tightly regulated social welfare state is often a byword for socialism. But in the last two decades the country has been transformed. today it offers a flexible and dynamic European model with ever falling public expenditure, lower taxes, economic growth and budget surpluses.

    After many years of absence from the Swedish debate, I attended a conference on the Swedish economy in the southern city of Malmö in May, organized by Swedbank. The 180 speakers represented the full range of Swedish views, which have moved amazingly far to the free-market right, not least social democrats and trade union leaders. Key values are competition, openness and efficiency, while social and environmental values remain. The idea is not to abolish social welfare but to make it more efficient through competition among private providers. A new consensus has emerged on having a social welfare society rather than a social welfare state.

    The changes have been dramatic. While Sweden’s public expenditure has fallen by one-fifth of gross domestic product since 1993, between 2000 and 2009 Britain’s public expenditure skyrocketed by 15 per cent. This has brought Swedish and British public spending to a similar level, but Sweden’s is still steadily falling. Swedish taxes have been cut and her markets have opened up. The Social Democratic Party was in power from 1932 until 1976, and again from 1994 until 2006, but Sweden was actually quite a liberal market economy until 1968. After a century of superior growth, its GDP per capita was the third highest in the world.

    But in 1968 left-wing madness took over. Our economic success had been too great, making the government take high economic growth as a given, and the left-wing wind that blew through the world in the late 1960s was particularly strong in Sweden. But the decisive reason was the election of the extreme socialist Olof Palme as prime minister in 1969. He dominated Swedish politics until he was murdered on the street in Stockholm in 1986. His murder remains unsolved, but it became a turning point for Swedish politics.Palme ruled with great force. From 1970 until 1989, he raised taxes, including wealth tax, to more than 100 per cent of income for the wealthy, while social security exploded. Palme undermined the rule of law through retroactive legislation and arbitrary state intervention. A major scheme for gradual nationalisation of Swedish corporations through a punitive tax on their profits, using the money to buy their shares, was adopted.

    Arguably, Sweden is the only old nation that has never gone through a revolution, and the people stayed obedient and peaceful in the face of this onslaught. Private initiative was the victim. Since everybody was paid full wages when taking sick leave, Swedes recorded more sick days than any other nation. The truly wealthy emigrated en masse whereas others worked less. Two decades of low growth ensued, and by 1990 GDP per capita had fallen to 18th in the world. Swedes started feeling poor during their holidays abroad. As elsewhere, Keynesian policies failed, and the country entered a cycle of rising inflation, devaluation and unemployment. In 1990, crisis hit. The country suffered a severe real-estate and bank crash that reduced GDP by 6 per cent in 1991-93. Prime real estate prices collapsed by 50 per cent in 1990. In 1992, like Britain, Sweden was forced into an uncontrolled devaluation of its currency. Unemployment surged and so did public expenditure that peaked at 71 per cent of GDP in 1993, when the budget deficit reached 11 per cent of GDP.

    Finally, in September 1991, the social democrats lost an election and a real non-socialist government under Carl Bildt came into office from 1991 to 1994. Although it was a four-party minority government, it took many radical decisions and broke the trend. It turned the country around. Sweden had been influenced by the free market ideology of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s. In particular Timbro, a free-market think tank financed by the Swedish Employers’ Confederation (SAF), caused a huge shift in political thinking. Right-wing social democrats, who controlled the public finances, systematically deregulated all the most complicated financial markets that left-wingers did not understand.

    Swedish reforms have been many, systematic, and comprehensive. The immediate concern was the budget deficit. In the 1990s, Sweden’s budget deficit was 13 per cent of GDP, with public expenditure cuts of 8 per cent of GDP and tax hikes of 5 per cent of GDP. Sweden’s public debt was gradually reduced from 73 per cent of GDP in 1996 to 38 per cent of GDP in 2011. The government trimmed all kinds of social security payments to reasonable levels. Sickness leave has fallen by half since employees are no longer paid from the first day or in full. Today, Sweden has regular budget surpluses, although tax revenues have been reduced by 9 per cent of GDP from 1994 until 2011. Sweden’s main scourge was tax. In 1990, the social democratic government actually cut sky-high marginal income tax from 90 per cent to 50 per cent. The current government has decreased taxes every year and abolished the wealth tax. Inheritance tax and gift tax are also gone. A corporate profit tax of 26 per cent may seem reasonable, but tax competition is fierce in this part of Europe, as most East European countries have slashed corporate taxes to 15-19 per cent. Business wants to reduce the corporate profit tax to 20 per cent.

    One of the greatest reliefs is the simplification of tax administration. Since the tax reforms of 1990 abolished almost all deductions, while cutting rates, tax declarations have become extremely simple. Ninety per cent of taxpayers simply confirm with a phone message that the declaration automatically prepared by the tax authorities for them is correct. Pensions have been subject to a major reform, giving everybody a pension in accordance with their contributions plus a minimum pension for all. As a consequence, the Swedish pension system is actuarially correct without any pay-as-you-go system or implicit pension debt. It is also transparent so that all can see how large a retirement capital they have saved, and to a considerable extent they can choose when and how to invest it and access it.

    The Swedish school system, Palme’s original bailiwick, was badly ravaged by left-wing reforms of the 1960s and 1970s. Today, all pupils are entitled to school vouchers of equal value for each child of a certain age. Their parents can allocate this school voucher to any school the child is qualified to enter. As a result, while in the 1970s Sweden had only four private schools, one-fifth of Swedish secondary schools are now private, some for profit, others cooperatives or non-profit foundations. Yet, in international school comparisons, Sweden lags behind Finland that never carried out any foolish left-wing reforms.

    In 1995, Sweden joined the European Union in order to safeguard the rule of law. In the bad old days, the Social Democratic Party regularly appointed its partisan top civil servants as supreme court judges. Being within the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice means that the prospects of winning against the Swedish government have improved greatly.After the devaluation of 1992, Sweden adopted a floating exchange rate and inflation targeting. The Riksbank used to be little more than a subdepartment of the ministry of finance, but now it is independent. Today Sweden has persistently one of the lowest inflation rates in Europe. In 2003, a referendum dismissed euro adoption.

    One of the first decisions of the Bildt government was to abolish the wage-earners’ funds (sharing company profits with employees) and stop all nationalisation. By and large, Sweden has followed Margaret Thatcher’s policy of privatisation, privatising piecemeal when market conditions are conducive.

    A tedious but important task is deregulation. Swedish governments have quietly deregulated one market after another, contributing to greater economic dynamism.The annual centralised wage bargaining between the Trade Union Confederation (LO) and SAF was the pride of the old Swedish model. But in the 1970s it led to inflation and strikes, and today this system is long gone. Wage bargaining is still collective, but it is becoming increasingly decentralised. Wage inflation is no longer a concern and strikes are extremely rare. The employers have won, but real wages are rising with productivity. As everywhere, trade unions are losing members, money, and power. The Trade Union Confederation has adjusted, its chair declaring recently: ‘We want flexibility on the labour market.’

    As the Thatcher revolution exemplified, real ideological victory is when your opponents steal your clothes. In 1994, the social democrats under Göran Persson returned to power and stayed until 2006. Although they complained about all the cuts the non-socialist government had undertaken and carried out few reforms, they did not revoke the reforms but completed fiscal tightening. It was actually Persson who abolished the inheritance and gift taxes.

    In 2006, four non-socialist parties formed a coalition government with Fredrik Reinfeldt as prime minister. Finance Minister Anders Borg, with his trademark pony-tail and earring, has led further reforms. After having taken Sweden successfully through the global financial crisis, this government was re-elected in 2010, and the Financial Times named Borg Europe’s best finance minister last year.

    Keynesianism remains disliked in Sweden. Before the global financial crisis Sweden had a budget surplus on average of 2.5 per cent of GDP in the years 2004?7. After a minimal budget deficit in 2009, it has once again a budget surplus. Sweden remains, like Germany and Finland, highly dependent on exports, and its GDP fell by 5 per cent in 2009, but it rebounded by 6 per cent in 2010 and 4 per cent in 2011, and the current account surplus is substantial. Sweden’s credit default swaps are lower than Germany’s. The only concerns are the euro crisis depressing demand, and unemployment, which hovers around 7.5 per cent.

    Swedes shake their heads when they see the economic policy in euro crisis countries. They take their cue from their own crisis in the early 1990s and call for far more expenditure cuts and structural reforms. Finance Minister Borg argues against more expansionary policy in Sweden in case the euro crisis should lead to a real meltdown.The right-wing drift of the much reduced Social Democratic Party continues, making it reminiscent of New Labour. Its brand-new leader, Stefan Löfven, came to prominence during the global financial crisis, when he and the metalworkers’ union agreed to major wage cuts to safeguard their real incomes in the long run. The social democrats have not only joined the free market consensus, but seem to attack the current government from the right, demanding a better business environment. Gone are demands for the restoration of social benefits. Opinion polls have rewarded the social democrats for their right turn with sharply improved ratings. The left-wing intellectuals are also gone. The old socialist think tanks have closed down. The Centre for Labour Market Studies was a state institution, and the non-socialist government closed it, since it did not generate research but left-wing propaganda. The Trade Union Organisation had a sophisticated research institute, which it eliminated for not being sufficiently political. The trade union economists, who dominated the Swedish economic debate in the 1970s and 1980s, have been replaced by bank economists. The free-market right has won the debate and maintains substantial think tanks in Stockholm. Their main problem is a lack of resistance.

    Sweden is not alone. Developments are similar in the other Scandinavian countries, the Baltic countries, and Poland. The Swedish about turn is the most dramatic. While its direction is clear, much remains to be done. The Baltic states look very attractive with public expenditures around 35 per cent of GDP and low, flat income taxes. They are a source of inspiration for their Scandinavian neighbours. In the last two years, five incumbent EU governments have been re-elected, namely centre-right governments in Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Poland, showing that the new North European conservatism enjoys popular support.
33. Anonyme dit :

    25 octobre 2012 à 22 h 28 min

    J’étais bien d’accord avec la corrélation David, j’avais juste mis un bémol au :

    Plus un pays est capitaliste, moins il y a de pauvres et inversement. 

    J’ai seulement dit que ce n’était qu’une corrélation, pas un un pour un, (bref y’a des pays beaucoup plus capitaliste que la suède avec beaucoup plus de pauvres).  
34. Hourst dit :

    25 octobre 2012 à 23 h 09 min

    Vous êtes mignons. C’est le monde des merveilles ce blogue, reprenez contact avec la réalité. Je ne parle pas du pouvoir d’acheter ou de ne pas acheter. Tout le monde a ce pouvoir (surtout de ne pas acheter pour les pauvres, enfin). Je parle des pouvoirs politique, économique et législatif. Les négociations sur L’ALENA, sur l’AMI, les interventions militaires en Amérique du Sud, les politiques de subventions aux entreprises, vous pensez vraiment que ces initiatives viennent du peuple? On va se dire ce qu’est réellement une corporation. C’est une personne morale (la définition est biaisé en partant), imortelle (pour des raisons évidentes) et souvent très riche. Désolé les potes, vous et moi on fait pas le poids.

    Vraiment vous êtes illusionnés. S’il y a un équilibre des forces, fragile, inconstant, en occident, c’est en raison des mesures sociales démocrates misent en oeuvre dans chacun des pays que je vous ai mentionné (n’en déplaise à David qui croit encore que j’ai dit que Harper était un socialiste). Un être humain est une personne. Une corporation ne devrait jamais l’être. Pourtant, il s’agit des entités les plus influentes dans un régime capitaliste débarassé des éléments socialisant qui lui mettent des bâtons dans les roues.
35. David dit :

    25 octobre 2012 à 23 h 13 min

    Tout le monde a ce pouvoir (surtout de ne pas acheter pour les pauvres, enfin). Je parle des pouvoirs politique, économique et législatif. Les négociations sur L’ALENA, sur l’AMI, les interventions militaires en Amérique du Sud, les politiques de subventions aux entreprises, vous pensez vraiment que ces initiatives viennent du peuple?

    Les gauchistes trouvent que le gouvernement prend de mauvaise décision, donc leur solution c’est d’avoir plus de gouvernement !

    Un être humain est une personne. Une corporation ne devrait jamais l’être.

    En effet, elles ne devraient pas payer d’impôt ni être réglementées.
36. Hourst dit :

    25 octobre 2012 à 23 h 34 min

    David, laisse les grands discuter.
37. Hourst dit :

    25 octobre 2012 à 23 h 35 min

    Vrai que le capitalisme augmente le niveau de vie et procure du confort au peuple. C’est la rançon à payer pour qu’il se la ferme. Tu leur fait miroiter la possibilité de « posséder », et tu jase de ce qui importe vraiment en coulisse avec ceux qui tiennent les commandes. Le capitalisme te donne le pouvoir d’acheter la voiture de l’année, et vous osez appeler cela « avoir du pouvoir ». Ceux qui sont vraiment ambitieux se moquent de vous les amis.

    Qu’on en vienne à nommer l’aliénation « liberté », le confort « richesse » et la consommation « pouvoir » est l’une des réalisations les plus extraordinaire et les plus tristes du néo libéralisme.
38. David dit :

    25 octobre 2012 à 23 h 48 min

    David, laisse les grands discuter.

    Sweden hardly a ‘socialist nightmare’
    As Obama tries to rein in Wall Street and raise taxes on the wealthy, critics say he is trying to turn America into Sweden. Meanwhile, in Sweden, it’s full-speed ahead for capitalism.

    Stockholm, Sweden – There is a long tradition of using Sweden as a socialist model to highlight social shortcomings in the United States. Recent tax change proposals by the Obama administration, for instance, had conservative commentator Bill O’Reilly asking his viewers, « Do we really want to change America into Sweden? »

    Yet if the Scandinavian model were shipped across the Atlantic, the changes would have little to do with socialism, say analysts here. In fact, some believe it should be held up as a bastion of market capitalism.

    Last week, the country’s center-right government began selling off state-owned pharmacies, one of the country’s few remaining nationalized companies, as part of an ambitious program of liberal economic reforms started in 2006. In the same week, a study by the Swedish Unemployment Insurance Board revealed that almost half of the country’s jobless lacked full unemployment benefits. Many opted out of the state scheme when the cost of membership was raised last year; others were ineligible.

    State pensions, schools, healthcare, public transport, and post offices have been fully or partly privatized over the last decade, making Sweden one of the most free market orientated economies in the world, analysts say.

    “Sweden has always been on the side of the market economy. This is not socialism,” says Olle Wästberg, director of the Swedish Institute in Stockholm, and a former Consul General to New York. “In many fields, we have more private ownership compared to other European countries, and to America. About 80 percent of all new schools are privately run, as are the railroads and the subway system.”

    Stereotypical images of Sweden as a socialist utopia date back to the 1930s, when a best selling book by Marquis Childs lauded the country as a middle way between capitalism and socialism.

    “Eisenhower also helped to propagate a number of myths in the ’60s when he said that Swedes were ‘addicted to sin, socialism, and suicide,’  » says Brian Palmer, professor of anthropology at Sweden’s Uppsala University (read a past Monitor story on the professor here).

    Images of all three Swedish vices were given a good dusting off and a 21st century remake last month on Jon Stewart’s Daily Show (watch the first part of the report here and the second part here). The hilarious « investigation » into the « socialist nightmare » state revealed that, apart from producing famed meatballs and red gummy fish candy, « socialism has left this population ravaged, dispirited, and hauntingly thin. » The last observation was made as the reporter watched beautiful Swedish women walk down the street.

    Jokes aside, Professor Palmer, who ran a controversial course on globalization at Harvard University from 2000 to 2004, believes that Sweden has been one step ahead of the US in adopting and extending economic reforms.

    “To speak of Sweden as socialist today is pretty far off the mark,” he says. “Neoliberal reforms have gone much further here in some sectors than in the US. Sweden has become a sort of laboratory for privatization in a way that the Heritage Foundation or the American Enterprise Institute could only dream of.”

    Sweden’s secret recipe
    Advice from a successful – and tax-cutting – finance minister

    When Europe’s finance ministers meet for a group photo, it’s easy to spot the rebel — Anders Borg has a ponytail and earring. What actually marks him out, though, is how he responded to the crash. While most countries in Europe borrowed massively, Borg did not. Since becoming Sweden’s finance minister, his mission has been to pare back government. His ‘stimulus’ was a permanent tax cut. To critics, this was fiscal lunacy — the so-called ‘punk tax cutting’ agenda. Borg, on the other hand, thought lunacy meant repeating the economics of the 1970s and expecting a different result.

    Three years on, it’s pretty clear who was right. ‘Look at Spain, Portugal or the UK, whose governments were arguing for large temporary stimulus,’ he says. ‘Well, we can see that very little of the stimulus went to the economy. But they are stuck with the debt.’ Tax-cutting Sweden, by contrast, had the fastest growth in Europe last year, when it also celebrated the abolition of its deficit. The recovery started just in time for the 2010 Swedish election, in which the Conservatives were re-elected for the first time in history.

    All this has taken Borg from curiosity to celebrity. The Financial Times recently declared him the most effective finance minister in Europe. When we meet in his Stockholm office on a Friday afternoon (he and his aide seem to be the only two left in the building) he says he is just carrying on 20 years of reform. ‘Sweden was a textbook case of European economic sclerosis. Very high taxes and huge regulatory burden.’ An economic crisis in the early 1990s forced Sweden on the road to balanced budgets, and Borg was determined the 2007 crash would not stop him cutting the size of government.

    ‘Everybody was told “stimulus, stimulus, stimulus”,’ he says — referring to the EU, IMF and the alphabet soup of agencies urging a global, debt-fuelled spending splurge. Borg, an economist, couldn’t work out how this would help. ‘It was surprising that Europe, given what we experienced in the 1970s and 80s with structural unemployment, believed that short-term Keynesianism could solve the problem.’ Non-economists, he says, ‘might have a tendency to fall for those kinds of messages’.

    He continued to cut taxes and cut welfare-spending to pay for it; he even cut property taxes for the rich to lure entrepreneurs back to Sweden. The last bit was the most unpopular, but for Borg, economic recovery starts with entrepreneurs. If cutting taxes for the rich encouraged risk-taking, then it had to be done. ‘In most cases, the company would not have been created without the owner,’ he says. ‘There would be no Ikea without [Ingvar] Kamprad. We would not have Tetra-Pak without [Ruben] Rausing. They are probably the foremost entrepreneurs we have had in the last few decades, and both moved out of Sweden.’

    But they were not rich, I say, when they were starting out. ‘No, but they were becoming rich. If you have a high wealth tax and an inheritance tax, people emigrate because it becomes too costly to own a company. Ownership is a production factor. Entrepreneurs are a production factor. Yes, these people are rich and you can obviously argue that we want to encourage social cohesion. But it is also problematic if you drive out entrepreneurs from your country, because they are the source of job creation.’

    Just as George Osborne took a hit for reducing the 52p tax to a 47p tax, so Borg’s party paid an political price for helping the rich. ‘If you are going to survive that politically, it is very important to cut taxes on low-income earners.’ He focused the tax credit on the low-paid, giving some the equivalent of a month’s extra salary every year. But there was still resentment. ‘We lost a lot of voters when we cut the property and the wealth tax, I don’t make any excuse for that. It was a severe blow to our support.’

    This is the only time in the interview when Borg speaks like the politician he claims not to be. ‘When I look at other politicians I tend to see myself more as an economist,’ he says. This is true in that he is appointed, not elected, and was chief economist for SEB bank. But before this, he was a young libertarian longing to turn the world upside-down. Internet footage still exists of a denim-clad Borg declaring on television that if he was prime minister he ‘wouldn’t do a damn thing, so the people could do whatever they want’. When he later became a prime ministerial adviser, he caused a stir when it emerged that a government staffer backed drug legalisation.

    When Fredrik Reinfeldt became party leader in 2003, he made Borg his right-hand man. It seemed a gamble at the time, but his faith in Borg’s expertise was absolute — Borg’s views had moderated, but his sense of urgency had not. ‘We came into government in October 2006 and we launched tax cuts in January 2007,’ he says, ‘so the first three months were extremely hectic.’ The Conservatives’ slogan was striking: ‘We are the new workers’ party.’ Tax rates would be cut for workers, and welfare cut to pay for it. High welfare levels, he says, can inflict cruelty in the name of compassion. ‘People emigrate from the labour market. Unemployment traps capture a lot of people in social exclusion.’ Tax cuts are not spoken of as an ideological aim, but as a tool to cut unemployment and advance social justice.

    What even Borg did not expect was that his tax cut for the low-paid would increase economic growth so much that it has almost entirely paid for itself. Borg had created something that Osborne’s critics say does not exist: a self-financing tax cut. ‘There was some criticism at the time that we were borrowing to finance tax cuts,’ he says. But Sweden could do it, because it was expecting to return to surplus soon; Britain has no such luxury, he says. His main advice to Osborne is: ‘Keep on dealing with the deficit, because deficits destroy everything else.’

    Borg and Osborne have a good relationship, as do David Cameron and Reinfeldt (who keep in touch via text message). All are men in their early forties, who pick fights with the old guard of their parties to flaunt their ‘modernising’ credentials. But politics in Britain and Sweden are as different now as they were in the 1980s, except the roles are reversed. Sweden is the unlikely champion of supply-side economics, with ideas too radical for Brits. There is cross-party support in Sweden for profit-seeking state schools, which Michael Gove won’t attempt. Borg’s tax-cutting policy was accompanied by a 268-page book explaining the dynamic link between lower taxes and more jobs. Such a document would be unthinkable from HM Treasury.

    Sound economics is simply a far larger part of the government mission in Sweden than in Britain. Cameron once observed that no one ‘gets up in the morning thinking “I wish the state was smaller”,’ which is perhaps true in Whitehall. But not in Stockholm where, on Reinfeldt’s 45th birthday, Borg presented him with a graph showing Sweden’s tax-to-GDP ratio dipping under the 45 per cent mark for the first time in decades. That is still, of course, one of the highest rates in the world.

    In public, Borg is not in the least triumphalist — if anything, he’s trying to stir up a bit of pessimism. Success has meant he now has to manage expectations, and Borg has taken to warning in his speeches that ‘a future economic crisis is as much a certainty in life as death and taxes’. He could add another certainty: that high taxes will slow down any economic recovery, and fortune tends to favour politicians who do something about that.

    A Swedish Lesson

    To Brits, Sweden with its tightly regulated social welfare state is often a byword for socialism. But in the last two decades the country has been transformed. today it offers a flexible and dynamic European model with ever falling public expenditure, lower taxes, economic growth and budget surpluses.

    After many years of absence from the Swedish debate, I attended a conference on the Swedish economy in the southern city of Malmö in May, organized by Swedbank. The 180 speakers represented the full range of Swedish views, which have moved amazingly far to the free-market right, not least social democrats and trade union leaders. Key values are competition, openness and efficiency, while social and environmental values remain. The idea is not to abolish social welfare but to make it more efficient through competition among private providers. A new consensus has emerged on having a social welfare society rather than a social welfare state.

    The changes have been dramatic. While Sweden’s public expenditure has fallen by one-fifth of gross domestic product since 1993, between 2000 and 2009 Britain’s public expenditure skyrocketed by 15 per cent. This has brought Swedish and British public spending to a similar level, but Sweden’s is still steadily falling. Swedish taxes have been cut and her markets have opened up. The Social Democratic Party was in power from 1932 until 1976, and again from 1994 until 2006, but Sweden was actually quite a liberal market economy until 1968. After a century of superior growth, its GDP per capita was the third highest in the world.

    But in 1968 left-wing madness took over. Our economic success had been too great, making the government take high economic growth as a given, and the left-wing wind that blew through the world in the late 1960s was particularly strong in Sweden. But the decisive reason was the election of the extreme socialist Olof Palme as prime minister in 1969. He dominated Swedish politics until he was murdered on the street in Stockholm in 1986. His murder remains unsolved, but it became a turning point for Swedish politics.Palme ruled with great force. From 1970 until 1989, he raised taxes, including wealth tax, to more than 100 per cent of income for the wealthy, while social security exploded. Palme undermined the rule of law through retroactive legislation and arbitrary state intervention. A major scheme for gradual nationalisation of Swedish corporations through a punitive tax on their profits, using the money to buy their shares, was adopted.

    Arguably, Sweden is the only old nation that has never gone through a revolution, and the people stayed obedient and peaceful in the face of this onslaught. Private initiative was the victim. Since everybody was paid full wages when taking sick leave, Swedes recorded more sick days than any other nation. The truly wealthy emigrated en masse whereas others worked less. Two decades of low growth ensued, and by 1990 GDP per capita had fallen to 18th in the world. Swedes started feeling poor during their holidays abroad. As elsewhere, Keynesian policies failed, and the country entered a cycle of rising inflation, devaluation and unemployment. In 1990, crisis hit. The country suffered a severe real-estate and bank crash that reduced GDP by 6 per cent in 1991-93. Prime real estate prices collapsed by 50 per cent in 1990. In 1992, like Britain, Sweden was forced into an uncontrolled devaluation of its currency. Unemployment surged and so did public expenditure that peaked at 71 per cent of GDP in 1993, when the budget deficit reached 11 per cent of GDP.

    Finally, in September 1991, the social democrats lost an election and a real non-socialist government under Carl Bildt came into office from 1991 to 1994. Although it was a four-party minority government, it took many radical decisions and broke the trend. It turned the country around. Sweden had been influenced by the free market ideology of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s. In particular Timbro, a free-market think tank financed by the Swedish Employers’ Confederation (SAF), caused a huge shift in political thinking. Right-wing social democrats, who controlled the public finances, systematically deregulated all the most complicated financial markets that left-wingers did not understand.

    Swedish reforms have been many, systematic, and comprehensive. The immediate concern was the budget deficit. In the 1990s, Sweden’s budget deficit was 13 per cent of GDP, with public expenditure cuts of 8 per cent of GDP and tax hikes of 5 per cent of GDP. Sweden’s public debt was gradually reduced from 73 per cent of GDP in 1996 to 38 per cent of GDP in 2011. The government trimmed all kinds of social security payments to reasonable levels. Sickness leave has fallen by half since employees are no longer paid from the first day or in full. Today, Sweden has regular budget surpluses, although tax revenues have been reduced by 9 per cent of GDP from 1994 until 2011. Sweden’s main scourge was tax. In 1990, the social democratic government actually cut sky-high marginal income tax from 90 per cent to 50 per cent. The current government has decreased taxes every year and abolished the wealth tax. Inheritance tax and gift tax are also gone. A corporate profit tax of 26 per cent may seem reasonable, but tax competition is fierce in this part of Europe, as most East European countries have slashed corporate taxes to 15-19 per cent. Business wants to reduce the corporate profit tax to 20 per cent.

    One of the greatest reliefs is the simplification of tax administration. Since the tax reforms of 1990 abolished almost all deductions, while cutting rates, tax declarations have become extremely simple. Ninety per cent of taxpayers simply confirm with a phone message that the declaration automatically prepared by the tax authorities for them is correct. Pensions have been subject to a major reform, giving everybody a pension in accordance with their contributions plus a minimum pension for all. As a consequence, the Swedish pension system is actuarially correct without any pay-as-you-go system or implicit pension debt. It is also transparent so that all can see how large a retirement capital they have saved, and to a considerable extent they can choose when and how to invest it and access it.

    The Swedish school system, Palme’s original bailiwick, was badly ravaged by left-wing reforms of the 1960s and 1970s. Today, all pupils are entitled to school vouchers of equal value for each child of a certain age. Their parents can allocate this school voucher to any school the child is qualified to enter. As a result, while in the 1970s Sweden had only four private schools, one-fifth of Swedish secondary schools are now private, some for profit, others cooperatives or non-profit foundations. Yet, in international school comparisons, Sweden lags behind Finland that never carried out any foolish left-wing reforms.

    In 1995, Sweden joined the European Union in order to safeguard the rule of law. In the bad old days, the Social Democratic Party regularly appointed its partisan top civil servants as supreme court judges. Being within the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice means that the prospects of winning against the Swedish government have improved greatly.After the devaluation of 1992, Sweden adopted a floating exchange rate and inflation targeting. The Riksbank used to be little more than a subdepartment of the ministry of finance, but now it is independent. Today Sweden has persistently one of the lowest inflation rates in Europe. In 2003, a referendum dismissed euro adoption.

    One of the first decisions of the Bildt government was to abolish the wage-earners’ funds (sharing company profits with employees) and stop all nationalisation. By and large, Sweden has followed Margaret Thatcher’s policy of privatisation, privatising piecemeal when market conditions are conducive.

    A tedious but important task is deregulation. Swedish governments have quietly deregulated one market after another, contributing to greater economic dynamism.The annual centralised wage bargaining between the Trade Union Confederation (LO) and SAF was the pride of the old Swedish model. But in the 1970s it led to inflation and strikes, and today this system is long gone. Wage bargaining is still collective, but it is becoming increasingly decentralised. Wage inflation is no longer a concern and strikes are extremely rare. The employers have won, but real wages are rising with productivity. As everywhere, trade unions are losing members, money, and power. The Trade Union Confederation has adjusted, its chair declaring recently: ‘We want flexibility on the labour market.’

    As the Thatcher revolution exemplified, real ideological victory is when your opponents steal your clothes. In 1994, the social democrats under Göran Persson returned to power and stayed until 2006. Although they complained about all the cuts the non-socialist government had undertaken and carried out few reforms, they did not revoke the reforms but completed fiscal tightening. It was actually Persson who abolished the inheritance and gift taxes.

    In 2006, four non-socialist parties formed a coalition government with Fredrik Reinfeldt as prime minister. Finance Minister Anders Borg, with his trademark pony-tail and earring, has led further reforms. After having taken Sweden successfully through the global financial crisis, this government was re-elected in 2010, and the Financial Times named Borg Europe’s best finance minister last year.

    Keynesianism remains disliked in Sweden. Before the global financial crisis Sweden had a budget surplus on average of 2.5 per cent of GDP in the years 2004?7. After a minimal budget deficit in 2009, it has once again a budget surplus. Sweden remains, like Germany and Finland, highly dependent on exports, and its GDP fell by 5 per cent in 2009, but it rebounded by 6 per cent in 2010 and 4 per cent in 2011, and the current account surplus is substantial. Sweden’s credit default swaps are lower than Germany’s. The only concerns are the euro crisis depressing demand, and unemployment, which hovers around 7.5 per cent.

    Swedes shake their heads when they see the economic policy in euro crisis countries. They take their cue from their own crisis in the early 1990s and call for far more expenditure cuts and structural reforms. Finance Minister Borg argues against more expansionary policy in Sweden in case the euro crisis should lead to a real meltdown.The right-wing drift of the much reduced Social Democratic Party continues, making it reminiscent of New Labour. Its brand-new leader, Stefan Löfven, came to prominence during the global financial crisis, when he and the metalworkers’ union agreed to major wage cuts to safeguard their real incomes in the long run. The social democrats have not only joined the free market consensus, but seem to attack the current government from the right, demanding a better business environment. Gone are demands for the restoration of social benefits. Opinion polls have rewarded the social democrats for their right turn with sharply improved ratings. The left-wing intellectuals are also gone. The old socialist think tanks have closed down. The Centre for Labour Market Studies was a state institution, and the non-socialist government closed it, since it did not generate research but left-wing propaganda. The Trade Union Organisation had a sophisticated research institute, which it eliminated for not being sufficiently political. The trade union economists, who dominated the Swedish economic debate in the 1970s and 1980s, have been replaced by bank economists. The free-market right has won the debate and maintains substantial think tanks in Stockholm. Their main problem is a lack of resistance.

    Sweden is not alone. Developments are similar in the other Scandinavian countries, the Baltic countries, and Poland. The Swedish about turn is the most dramatic. While its direction is clear, much remains to be done. The Baltic states look very attractive with public expenditures around 35 per cent of GDP and low, flat income taxes. They are a source of inspiration for their Scandinavian neighbours. In the last two years, five incumbent EU governments have been re-elected, namely centre-right governments in Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Poland, showing that the new North European conservatism enjoys popular support.

    ——————–

    Hoooooooooooooooooooooo snapppppppppppppppppp !
39. David dit :

    25 octobre 2012 à 23 h 52 min

    Le capitalisme te donne le pouvoir d’acheter la voiture de l’année, et vous osez appeler cela « avoir du pouvoir ».

    Absolument.

    La liberté de se déplacer, liberté fondamentale.

    C’est pour ça que les gauchiste détestent autant l’automobile.

    Les gauchistes préfèrent le dirigisme du transport en commun.

    « There’s something romantic about trains, but try getting the tracks to come to your house. When it comes time to unload the groceries, the romance of the train ends immediately.

    Politicians love trains. Why? Because they can tell where the tracks go. They know where everybody’s going. For policiticians it’s all about control and power. Politicians hate cars because cars make people free. Not only free in the sense that they can go anywhere they want, which bugs politicians, but they can move out of the political districts that the politicians represent.

    Politics itself is nothing more than an attempt to achieve power and prestige without merit. That’s the definition of politics. »

    -P. J. O’Rourke

    Encore une fois, Hourst est cassé.
40. Anonyme dit :

    26 octobre 2012 à 0 h 04 min

    Les politiciens n’aiment pas les voitures, vraiment ?

    Je ne suis pas convaincu que c’est aussi gauche droite que ça, bien des gens de droite doivent bien aimer bien des transport en commun, comme l’Avion, les TVG, les métros et compagnies et bien des gens à gauche utilise à tous les jours une voiture. 
41. Bobjack dit :

    26 octobre 2012 à 0 h 24 min

    Pourquoi vous expliquez encore à Hourst, il a un reset automatique à chaque fois et à les yeux et les oreilles remplies de béton.

    Même Chuck Norris ne pourrait défaire ses illusions par un coup de pied. 
42. Matlin dit :

    26 octobre 2012 à 1 h 13 min

    Hourst dit que les riches ont plus de pouvoirs politique, économique et législatif, mais d’un autre côté, il défend l’idéologie gauchiste qui réclame plus de lois, plus de règles et plus d »interventions économiques. Lâche pas ton combat parce qu’il sera sans fin!
43. David dit :

    26 octobre 2012 à 1 h 26 min

    Je ne suis pas convaincu que c’est aussi gauche droite que ça, bien des gens de droite doivent bien aimer bien des transport en commun, comme l’Avion, les TVG, les métros et compagnies et bien des gens à gauche utilise à tous les jours une voiture.

    Transport en commun dans le sens de transport public qui se fait au détriment de la voiture.
44. Hourst dit :

    26 octobre 2012 à 7 h 57 min

    Si vous vous posiez des questions au lieu d’attaquer les « gauchistes » et le  »transport en commun »?
45. Hourst dit :

    26 octobre 2012 à 7 h 59 min

    Matlin, ce que je défends est une vraie démocratie. L’état au service du peuple, pas à celui des corporations et de ceux qui ont plus de cash. C’est pas juste une question de plus d’État ou moins d’État. Enlevez vous cela de la tête.
46. lemoutongris dit :

    26 octobre 2012 à 8 h 58 min

    « Les négociations sur L’ALENA, sur l’AMI, les interventions militaires en Amérique du Sud, les politiques de subventions aux entreprises, vous pensez vraiment que ces initiatives viennent du peuple? »

    Tu mets sur le même pied du libre-échange et de l’impérialisme. vraiment, les socialistes n’ont aucun argument (ou ne connaissent rien) 
47. pat dit :

    26 octobre 2012 à 10 h 30 min

    Hourst:

    Je te met au défi de me nommer 1 pays communiste dans lequel le peuple a le pouvoir et non pas le gouvernement.

    Tu te souviens au printemps passé quand Charest a fait une loi pour empecher le monde de faire la grève? Il a adopté une mesure de gauchiste pour affaiblir le pouvoir de la population.

    Droite = liberté. C’est pas compliqué.

    On dirait que les seuls arguments que tu as contre la droite c’est des example de personne qui abusent du système. Veux-tu que je te fasse une liste d’exemple d’abus dans la gauche? Tu compare les defauts de la droite avec la gauche utopique.
48. respectable dit :

    26 octobre 2012 à 19 h 20 min

    Il est évident que la gauche déteste les autos et c’est pas à cause du C02 ça c’est sûr.
49. Gilles Laplante dit :

    26 octobre 2012 à 20 h 30 min

    « Vrai que le capitalisme augmente le niveau de vie et procure du confort au peuple. C’est la rançon à payer pour qu’il se la ferme. »

    Ça fait moins mal que la balle dans la tête qui est la rançon à payer dans les pays socialistes totalitaires. En passant, les carrés rouges se la sont-ils fermée? 
50. David dit :

    26 octobre 2012 à 20 h 42 min

    L’état au service du peuple, pas à celui des corporations et de ceux qui ont plus de cash.

    L’État est corrompu donc il faut plus d’État.

    La logique redoutable de la gauche…
51. Matlin dit :

    26 octobre 2012 à 21 h 33 min

    Matlin, ce que je défends est une vraie démocratie. L’état au service du peuple, pas à celui des corporations et de ceux qui ont plus de cash. C’est pas juste une question de plus d’État ou moins d’État. Enlevez vous cela de la tête.

    La vraie démocratie passe par le libéralisme. C’est pas compliqué, tu donne du pouvoir à quelqu’un, il en profite. Dis moi comment tu fais pour contrôler ton armée de députés et de fonctionnaires et s’assurer qu’ils servent réellement le peuple? Quand ils ne servent plus le peuple tu fais quoi? Des manifestations violentes dans la rue?
52. bobjack dit :

    27 octobre 2012 à 0 h 55 min

    Servir le peuple est impossible, chaque individu ayant des inspirations différentes, toutes personnes disant servir le peuple est un menteur.

    La seule chose qu’ils peuvent faire c’est s’assurer de maintenir la liberté (donc capitalisme) et le territoire. 
53. Maxim Bernard dit :

    27 octobre 2012 à 21 h 21 min

    Un État démocratique et au service du peuple ? C’est beaucoup plus facile quand on a un État de taille raisonnable.

    Hourst, comment veut-tu que la démocratie gère nos 56 000 services publics, ministères, organismes de régulation et programmes sociaux ? Écoles, hôpitaux, routes, justice, lois, environnement, finances publiques, Hydro-Québec, Caisse de dépôt et tout le reste ? Il y en a tellement qu’on n’a pas le choix de déléguer ça aux autres.

    Le problème, c’est que les politiciens se corrompent facilement. Quand on laisse ça entre leurs mains, ils peuvent faire à peu près ce qu’ils veulent. Sauf que si on veut laisser nos services gérés par l’État, c’est nécessairement… des politiciens, qui s’en occupent !

    Pas le choix. Soit on demande moins d’État, soit on accepte de vivre dans la corruption.