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What can we learn from the Swedish Finance Minister Anders Borg?
Anders Borg has a message for those who look to government to take over health care, rescue the financial system and run troubled corporations: I have seen the future--and it doesn't work.
As the finance minister of Sweden, Borg is the chief financial officer of a country long known as a walking billboard for a social welfare state.
"Like many societies, we went too far in our welfare-state ambitions," say Borg (pronounced "Bor-ee").
These days President Obama is overseeing the largest increase in the U.S. government's share of the economy since it was conducting a world war almost seven decades ago. Economic stimulus, bailouts and expanded health care will all have to be paid for someday with either taxes or inflation. Borg is pushing Sweden in the opposite direction, encouraging the legislature to cut taxes, cap spending and privatize parts of health care.
"If you're working yourselves upwards in taxes and deficits, we're working ourselves downwards," says Borg. (FORBES recently interviewed him in Berlin, where he had delivered a speech.)
But wait a minute! I thought that we were going to spend ourselves to prosperity. Obama said that we have to spend in order to get out of this current economic situation. I thought that I could go out, assume massive debt, with no plan to pay it back, and somehow end up on top. That's what we are being told.
Next year Sweden's government is projected to be on the hook for gross financial liabilities equal to 57% of GDP, which is up from 48% two years ago. The debt of U.S. government entities, by contrast, is expected to nearly equal GDP by next year, versus 63% in 2007, says the Organization for Economic Cooperation & Development.
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 ( TLSNF.PK - news - people ) 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.
I wonder why this didn't make the major news in the U.S. This is a big deal! We have a traditionally liberal country coming around to a traditionally "U.S." way of thinking. I wonder why other countries government's are starting to see the flaws inherent in socialist systems? Meanwhile the U.S. government seems hell bent on passing new legislation insuring that we take steps BACKWARDS.
Am I the only one that thinks that this is patently absurd? Do the U.S. politicians have any "real" idea what they are doing? I know the American people do, and the American people want the government to stop. This administration's falling approval numbers are proof of this discontent.
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Obama has no intention of supporting free enterprise. He spent the last 20 years doing periodic legal work for groups like ACORN. ACORN was founded by Standford socialists with the stated goal to destroy U.S. free enterprise by 1) overtaxing and 2) overburdending the welfare system. Everything Obama has done to date forwards one or both of these goals.The American media is like American public education: it is a SOCIALIST enclave. You will never hear anything like truth there that detracts from their myths of "socialist-utopia" and "Darwinian-evolution" (both philosophies go hand in hand, by the way--just read Hitler's autobiography, where he outlines how Darwinian evolution sparked his 'supremist racial views,' aka 'survival-of-the-fittest').
Obama has been modeled after FDR (remember the "Time" magazine cover where Obama's face was superimposed over FDR's with the headline "The NEW New Deal"?). Well, FDR was a socialist who also "saved" America by another SOCIALIST-INDUCED economic meltdown.
That "fake meltdown" started in 1913, when socialist Woodrow Wilson signed the "Federal Reserve Act," placing control of the U.S. banking system in the hands of European socialist bankers. Within 20 years, SUPRISE!, the U.S. was bankrupt and SHOCKER! the "Great Depression" was upon us. FDR, socialist, was conveniently on hand to "save us." HOW? See ACORN's stated goals, above: 1) taxation, and 2) socialist spending. FDR deepened the Depression, post-poned recovery, and galvanized socialism in our nation. It was never FDR's goal to support U.S. free enterprise--he wanted to be like "Uncle Joe"--you know--Joseph Stalin, mass murderer of untold millions.
The American media is controlled by the same folks that control the banking system since 1913: socialists.
Another detail about how Obama is modelled after FDR: the same way a fake socialist-induced economic meltdown created an opportunity for FDR's socialism to "save the day" and entrench socialism in America, I believe the current economic meltdown was socialist-induced.Note the policies that created the current economic meltdown. Not one of them are by conservatives. Every single one of the policies were put forth by Barney Frank (liberal-socialist), Congressman Reid (liberal-socialist), Sen. Dodd (liberal-socialist), and defended vociferiously by then-senator Obama.
I am not Bush defender, but Obama is a bold-faced liar when he claimed he "inherited" this economy. He helped create it. Liberals love to blame Bush for the economy. Name one Bush policy that created this meltdown. Again, they were all liberal-socialist policies that used the Wilson/FDR-socialist created infrastructure (Federal Reserve, Fannie Mae, etc ...) to create a climate that knowingly would destroy the credit markets. I believe this was orchestrated.
And lo-and-behold! A socialist-communist, packaged by this same American media that fails to mention this story about Sweden's failed socialist experiments, comes in to "save" us. In reality, it opens the door to allow the socialists to entrench their socialistic control over every aspect of our lives. As Obama-socialist Rahn Emanuel states, "you never want a crisis to go to waste" to get done "things you otherwise could never do."
athrillofhope: If you put everything aside... Then note that the Sweden, looking at the U.S., is wondering why we are moving more towards socialism. That in itself is amazing! The former Soviet leaders were wondering the same thing during the early 1990s after the breakup of their Bloc. As the former-Soviets moved toward free enterprise, our government was continuing to take away financial rewards for productivity. Only the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994 halted that (and created the budget surpluses and positive economic movements that Clinton/Gore later took credit for). 
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