Author: Ray

For those who don’t believe that political-economic questions and their answers are entirely grounded in philosophy and that philosophy underpins all knowledge, scientific and otherwise, I ask you to observe the nightmarish spectacle unreeling before us now: because in your lifetime you’re not likely to see a greater global-wide testament to the inescapable fact and nature of philosophy’s foundational place in human life.

Ask yourself: How do you know what you know or believe you know about Covid-19? 

How do you know how contagious it is? 

How do you know the risks? The infection rate? The demographics? The geography of the spread? 

How do you know the actual death-rate? By what means? 

Ask yourself: By what method or methods do you conclude? By what process do you determine accuracy? How do you distinguish between possible, probable, and certain? 

How do you decide if the information you’re acting upon is true? By what standard? 

What does “true” mean? 

Is true synonymous with correct? 

Ask yourself: How do we calculate the number of people worldwide, who are suffering from other illnesses and who cannot receive medical attention because of policies that have been enacted overnight? Upon what data were these policies determined? And was that data accurate? And how do we know? 

How does government determine “essential businesses” from “non-essential” and why? 

By what authority is government permitted to arrest people for being outside? 

By what authority is government permitted to break up a one-year-old’s birthday party?

How do we calculate the number of people who will lose their entire life savings and the retirement for which they worked all their adult life? 

How do we calculate the number of small businesses, including dentists, veterinarians, optometrists, doctors, and much, much, much more that will vanish because of governmental mandates — mandates permitted by whose authority? Mandates based upon what data? And how do we know if that data is correct? 

How do we calculate the number of grocery stores and gas stations that will no longer be able to stay open and keep stocked? 

Will crime spike? Will the social fabric tear apart? And how do you know, one way or the other? 

How? 

How do you even attempt to know?

Nobel Prize winning economist Friedrich Hayek described the “flow of knowledge” as the “central issue in all social organization,” which is overwhelmingly economic. Ask yourself: have we been cut off from a flow of knowledge which otherwise would have been ours had we left this issue to the private, non-governmental sectors, which sectors would have brought you a Covid-19 test as quickly as you could order takeout, and for the exact same reasons?

Why is the so-called Swine Flu (H1N1) from ten years ago all but forgotten — despite 57 million infections worldwide and 12,469 fatalities — whereas coronavirus has created a collective panic worldwide and, as a result of that panic, an economic nightmare in the making? Was the critical difference really that in the case of H1N1, the CDC worked with private laboratories and private medical facilities to disperse the tests, and succeeded?

Ask yourself: why have contrary perspectives by people with impeccable credentials been ignored?

Why in South Korea have infection rates fallen and fallen — with no shutdowns, no geographic quarantines, no panics, but everything open for business? Was it simply that they had access to testing, which is to say that people were given access to the essential and most important flow of information that was necessary at the time? 

Was this really the case?

And is the opposite actually the major source of the problem in, for example, the United States? 

Is it really, as Hayek said, that the flows of information, when they’re cut off by force — force for whatever reason and in whatever form — lead to complete chaos? 

Did you feel that shift?

I did.

Each day something amorphous is growing clearer — an immense and looming thing, taking shape on the edge of the earth, casting an apocalyptic shadow. It will, I believe, continue to clarify, and that something is this: the greatest swath of destruction being cut by Covid-19 is not the infection itself but the annihilation of thousands upon thousands upon thousands of businesses and jobs and individual livelihoods — a feat accomplished by the only thing monstrous enough to be able to accomplish such a thing: the sheer force of governmental decree; mandates shutting down businesses overnight for any length of time the government so specifies; cities imposing curfews, road closures, sidewalk closures; hours-of-operation determined entirely by government edict; steep fines imposed upon individuals who’ve done no crime at all.

When you disrupt the division of labor long enough, you threaten the food supply. All societies nourish themselves by means of their food supply.

The whole structure of production is so complex and interdependent, operating, even in hampered form, by means of the elegant natural-order which laissez-faire creates (i.e. voluntary exchange), so complex and interdependent, I repeat, that when you start failing on just a few components – and this doesn’t take long – you create colossal problems: problems of such a complicated and intractable nature that they completely dwarf the problems created by Covid-19.

And yet even in spite of this unspeakable injustice, this utter atrocity exhibition, the daily headlines garnering the most attention are the sensationalized number of cases and number of deaths — despite the paucity of anything resembling complete data.

The root of this issue, like the root of most issues, is entirely epistemic.

It is for this reason that I’d like you to consider the following, which comes from Stephen C. Miller, of Troy University. It highlights a dawning realization that’s been forming on the horizon of my mind over the course of the past several days — beginning with my discovery of Stanford School of Medicine researchers Eran Bendavid and Jay Battacharya’s data, and then strengthened by the curious case of Iceland, both of which point to this conclusion: at least half of coronavirus carriers go symptomless, with many more having such mild symptoms that they don’t even connect it with the virus. The implications of this are far-reaching and significant.

In the words of Dr. Amesh Adalja, an infectious disease specialist at Johns Hopkins University, on the front-lines of this pandemic and a senior advisor in bio-terror prevention at Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security:

“Coronavirus is perhaps a little more fatal than seasonal flu. But not a lot.”

After two months of measuring and attempting to contain the coronavirus, the data supports one of the two following conclusions — and they both can’t be correct:

1. The virus is highly contagious, with the number of infected people doubling every three days.

2. The fatality rate is significantly higher than for the seasonal flu.

The reason these both can’t be correct is explained with great clarity in Stephen C. Miller’s recent article:

If this first claim is correct, then even though there are approximately 100,000 confirmed cases in the U.S., the virus has been spreading much more rapidly than we can test for it, if it has truly doubled every three days since January. If COVID-19 truly spreads that quickly, then the true number of infected in the U.S. is much higher — perhaps several million, as Stanford School of Medicine researchers Eran Bendavid and Jay Battacharya suggest in the Wall Street Journal.

If millions have been infected, then it logically follows that the current number of confirmed cases vastly understates the true number of infected. But even if only two million people have been infected (which would suggest a slower growth rate than the models projected), then the number of deaths as of Friday (just over 1,500) yields a fatality rate of just under 0.08 percent, or slightly less than the seasonal flu. [my emphasis]

If there are several million infected, then the fatality rate is a small fraction of the seasonal flu, perhaps as low as 0.01 percent. Those numbers would suggest that the U.S. is facing a new virus with flu-like symptoms, one that, like many viruses, is a dangerous threat to those with weak immune systems or respiratory problems. But ultimately it is milder and far less deadly than last year’s seasonal flu.[my emphasis]

The alternative is to believe that the fatality rate is as high as the reported numbers suggest, 4.5 percent globally, or about 1.2 to 1.6 percent in the U.S. (see the chart below). If so, then the virus is unusually difficult to transmit. If we just go by confirmed cases, then only about 80 thousand people have been infected in China, out of a population of 1.38 billion, or 0.006 percent.[my emphasis]

Or that so far, after over three months, the coronavirus has only infected 617,000 people globally, or roughly 0.008 percent of the population. If we believe the number of cases is more or less right, then the virus spreads much more slowly than imagined. [my emphasis]

The main difficulty at this stage is in knowing how rapidly the virus spreads.

The reason this is a crux is that that specific metric— which can only come from comprehensive testing — is the only metric which provides the true number of cases; and at this point, the virus spreads more rapidly than we’re able test for it. Thus, without knowing the true number of cases, we cannot accurately calculate the true death rate.

Let me repeat that:

Without knowing the true number of cases, we cannot accurately calculate the true death rate.

I ask you to please process that.

The progress in testing, however, such as it’s been, has cast light on both questions: the spread of the virus and its lethality.

This new light, while not conclusive, is undeniably suggestive:

The chart above shows in no uncertain terms that as testing has expanded, the fatality rate has plummeted.

The chart below shows the growth in testing and the portion of those tests which have been positive. The latest data on testing disclose that across America, roughly 16 percent of administered tests come back positive, though in New York the number of positive tests is over 30 percent (see the third chart).

The charts suggest that New York State either has a higher infection rate than the rest of the country (which is plausible given the higher population density), or that testing in New York has been even more focused on the seriously ill than is the case nationally. While the former is likely true, there is also evidence for the latter: New York’s hospitalization rate for confirmed cases (19%) is five percent higher than the current national average (14%).

So which is it, is the virus spreading very rapidly or is it especially deadly?

Given what we know about how similar viruses spread, it seems reasonable to believe the virus spreads more rapidly than the testing data indicate, and that the true number of cases is many times larger than 100,000. The infected are likely in the millions, but the rationing of tests prevents us from knowing the true number. In any case, that means the death rate is vastly overstated, and likely even lower than what has been typically reported for the seasonal flu. But there is also reason to believe that the coronavirus, while highly contagious in the same sense that many common viruses are, is not really more contagious than the seasonal flu. To believe that, we would have to believe the total number of infected is in the tens of millions nationally, even with the social distancing measures in place.

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Meanwhile, emerging ideologies continue to swell while others, bankrupt from the beginning though never actually recognized as such (largely because of the overwhelming effectiveness of certain propaganda machines), have been punctured — deflated almost over night:

“I’m thinking in particular of the variety of environmentalism that eschews functioning toilets and faucets and expresses loathing of consumer culture. The plastic bags are now back at check-out counters, the toilet paper aisle is empty, and ‘impossible burgers’ sit on the shelf unbought. Yes, meat is back. So is cleanliness. It turns out the deep green ideology was a luxury good consumable only in peace and prosperity…. Pundits with no previous knowledge of anything medical much less epidemiological who were cocksure that this disease was the new Black Death. They couldn’t wait to explain it to the rest of us. And [among millennials] in the millenarian press, we heard that this is proof of the coming rapture, god’s vengeance against a sinful world, the fulfillment of prophecy….”

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The following is from a good article, published earlier today and penned by Edward Peter Stringham, an economist I much admire. Here’s an excerpt: 

Hundreds of professors associated with Yale University organized a letter with signatures to send to the White House. It was signed by 800 credentialed professionals largely from the fields of epidemiology and medicine. It is not what I would call a free-market treatise, to be sure, and I do not agree with parts of it. 

Still … the letter warns that the crackdowns, shutdowns, travel restrictions, sweeping closures, and work restrictions could be counterproductive and not produce the results people hope for. This echoes the concern expressed by Stanford epidemiologist John Ioannidis and his recently published work that warns that we are taking extreme measures with low-quality information with little interest in costs. 

And where the letter worries about the loss of public services, I would add the worry of the loss of essential economic services. I will quote large sections of this letter. My main message here is as follows. If you worry that the coercive measures government is using and proposing go way too far, you are not alone: many in the mainstream of the medical profession agree with you. 

“Mandatory quarantine, regional lockdowns, and travel bans have been used to address the risk of COVID-19 in the US and abroad. But they are difficult to implement, can undermine public trust, have large societal costs and, importantly, disproportionately affect the most vulnerable segments in our communities. Such measures can be effective only under specific circumstances. All such measures must be guided by science, with appropriate protection of the rights of those impacted. Infringements on liberties need to be proportional to the risk presented by those affected, scientifically sound, transparent to the public, least restrictive means to protect public health, and regularly revisited to ensure that they are still needed as the epidemic evolves. 

“Voluntary self-isolation measures are more likely to induce cooperation and protect public trust than coercive measures, and are more likely to prevent attempts to avoid contact with the healthcare system.”

Read the full article here.

I also recommend A Virus Worse Than the One from Wuhan, also by an economist (and historian) named Lawrence W. Reed, of the Foundation for Economic Education.

But I list the best one last, and I highly recommend this piece — written by a man who, like me, classifies himself not as a “libertarian” (whatever that actually means) but as a classic liberal. It reads, in part:

It’s no surprise to see the headline, “There Are No Libertarians in an Epidemic.” By “libertarians,” the author means advocates of small government and individual liberty.

The idea is that when a crisis hits, everyone suddenly realizes how much they need a bigger government. This is a bizarre argument to make about a virus that got a foothold partly because of the corrupt and tyrannical policies of a communist government in China. The outbreak is currently at its worst in Italy, where socialized medicine has not turned out to be a panacea. And it was allowed to get out of control in America because the feds imposed an incompetent government monopoly on COVID-19 testing, blocking the use of better and faster tests developed by private companies.

Not only has Big Government been a significant magnifier of this crisis, the actual remediating solutions have been largely implemented through voluntary action.

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Give special notice to that last thing. Because not only is it true: it hits precisely upon an important principle — a foundational principle, and one I’ve been thinking a lot about lately — often lost in the details and often ignored, and that principle is this:

Those of us who believe that “that government governs best which governs least” (Henry David Thoreau, though it’s often misattributed to Thomas Jefferson) are not categorically opposed to any number of the same ideas and ends that the opposite view holds. The distinction is a distinction of means. The crucial issue in question — and I ask you to please consider this — is the issue of forced action versus voluntary action.

Laissez faire explicitly prohibits the initiation of force — which includes government force, as well as force instigated by any individual: government-forced charity, for example, and all variations thereupon. But this does not mean that people can’t organize and act voluntarily to achieve socialistic ends. In fact, one of the most persuasive arguments — certainly for me when, as teenager, I began looking more deeply into these sorts of subjects — is the overwhelming success of voluntary charities and safety nets, which almost invariably work more efficiently and effectively than systems of legal compulsion and state-sanctioned force (like housing projects and Native American Reservations, to say nothing of the bankrupt Medicare/Medicaid systems), as well as the attendant mazes of bureaucracy that these systems necessarily require.

As Lawrence W. Reed wrote in the above-cited article:

Nothing prevents socialists from doing any of these things by voluntary agreement amongst themselves. That’s one of the great advantages of [laissez faire]: You and your willing friends can practice socialism if you so desire, whereas a great disadvantage of socialism is that you can’t practice full freedom until socialism fails so miserably that even its sycophants throw in the towel.

But a safe bet is that in a world of some eight billion people, not a single socialist will make the slightest attempt to do any of these things. The whole idea of socialism—which explains the inherent hypocrisy of its advocates—is not to freely practice what you preach. It’s to use power to force others to practice what you preach.

He’s right: under a system of legally guaranteed and fully protected individual rights, which of course includes full property rights, you are perfectly free to practice socialism, as many people in this country have. And yet the opposite of that is not the case.

Nobody has the moral right to seek his own advantage by force. That is the one unalterable, inviolable condition of a true society. Whether we are many, or whether we are few, we must learn only to use the weapons of reason, discussion, and persuasion…. As long as hummans are willing to make use of force for their own ends, or to make use of fraud, which is only force in disguise, wearing a mask, and evading our consent, just as force with violence openly disregards it — so long we must use force to restrain force. That is the one and only one right employment of force … force in the defense of the plain simple rights of property, public or private, in a world, of all the rights of self-ownership — force used defensively against force used aggressively (Auberon Herbert, The Principles of Voluntaryism, 1897).

And the wise and erudite Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835), ahead of his time and timeless:

Any State interference in private affairs, where there is no immediate reference to violence done to individual rights, should be absolutely condemned.

Moral law obliges us to regard every individual human being as an end to him or heself.

Political activity can only extend its influence to such actions as imply a direct trespass on the rights of others.

It is only actual violations of right which require any other power to counteract them than that which every individual possesses.

The State organism is merely a subordinate means, to which individual person, the true end, is never to be sacrificed.

The State, then, is not to concern itself in any way with the positive welfare of its citizens … except where these are imperiled by the actions of others, but it is to keep a vigilant eye on their security.

Actions do no violence to right except when they deprive another of a part of his freedom or possessions without, or against, his will.

(Wilhelm von Humboldt, The Limits of State Action)

In fact, it will make it worse

The entire crisis is largely about how government responds and how people panic, and if you doubt this, I invite you to read about why Singapore’s coronavirus response worked, and why Hong Kong has toilet paper surpluses — even while the rest of the world suffers severe shortages.

Singapore’s response to the coronavirus has been held up by many around the world as a model. As of this week, the country has had 266 total cases (with zero deaths), and its infection rate is much slower than the rest of the world. 

(Link).

Wired Magazine, a garden-variety liberal publication, recently said this: “we’re all libertarians during a pandemic” – while the garden-variety liberal Atlantic Magazine recently said the exact opposite: “there are no libertarians during a pandemic.” Which partisan dogmatist should we believe?

Not, incidentally, that the word “libertarian” means anything — a rubber word which can be stretched to cover virtually anything: i.e. Noam Chomsky, civil libertarian, Ron Paul, Rothbardian libertarian, et cetera.

Meanwhile, as this partisan approach rages, the entire world glimpses firsthand, in a way it never has before, that economic law cannot be subverted, is non-partisan, and that in order to prosper and flourish, human beings must produce.

Meanwhile, as partisan ideologues rage on, the world sees up close and personal that voluntary exchange is the very engine of human progress and civilization.

The world sees, in short, the awesome logic of Says Law — yet the world doesn’t know what it’s seeing.

Fact:

In 1934, in their spare and private time, two American biologists, Pearl Kendrick and Grace Eldering, developed a vaccine for whooping cough, then the biggest killer of children in the United States.

It is astounding and appalling – and yet totally unsurprising – to witness governments all across the world trashing their entire economies (and in the process violating individual liberties on a massive scale, while also letting thousands of people get sick), rather than allow widespread testing:

As Ronald Bailey has noted, the FDA and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention “stymied private and academic development of diagnostic tests that might have provided an early warning and a head start on controlling the epidemic that is now spreading across the country.”

And if the policies and decisions above are worth tossing out in an emergency, maybe they ought to be sidelined during normal times too.

Situations like the 9/11 attacks and the coronavirus outbreak often open the door to naked power grabs whose terrible consequences stick around long after the events that inspired them (looking at you, TSA!). Governments rarely return power once they’ve amassed it. But if you listen carefully, you can hear them telling us what stuff they realize can be safely tossed. When the infection rates come down and the theaters and schools and everything else get back to normal, it may be tempting just to go back to the way we were. Resist the temptation.

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Reader, remember this always: it is far easier to compensate the small portion of the population at risk for serious respiratory issues than it is to reinvigorate a dead economy and the thousands upon thousand upon thousands of businesses that die because of this.

There’s an iron-clad economic principle, very easy to understand if you stop and think about it – a principle most clearly articulated by the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises – that says this: so long as the wealth of a society remains weak or impoverished, the means of dealing with societal issues remains proportionately weak. 

Please consider that.

Please consider where actual wealth comes from.

It comes from production.

Which comes from the freedom to produce – and, just as importantly, the freedom to keep and use the fruits of what you produce, which includes freely exchanging.

The wealthier the country, the healthier the country.

Point of context: When my grandmother was a child, she was lucky to get a single orange for Christmas. I just got a whole damn box of fabulous oranges delivered in the middle of a global pandemic.

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Shutting down private businesses by government decree is economic suicide. It also borders upon martial law. And while this action may flatten the curve of COVID-19 – though probably not – it will in the long run be equivalent to attempting a cure by suicide. 

The majority of people stricken by the virus will survive. Small businesses – run by families that depend upon these businesses for their very livelihood – won’t.

Now please tell me how you’re protecting the life of the individual by indefinitely preventing her from earning a living? By flooding the market with currency (reducing the value of her savings even more) and by instituting powers that will likely never be reversed?

Our hospitals were already crippled by rights-violating regulations to a point they might not be able to cope with this pandemic. The solution offered: violate more rights, cripple entire economies, so that, perhaps, fewer people will need those hospitals.

I’m going to articulate a thought which some of you may also be thinking:

We can’t make it for very long by holing-up in our homes.

Humans must work to produce goods and services. This is how we survive and thrive as a species.

In the meantime, thinking and science have become completely politicized. 

The following is excerpted from a recent article, written by doctor Amesh Adalja – a very smart and levelheaded infectious-disease doc, who also happens to be an uncompromising advocate for free-market medicine:

A prolonged freeze of the economy — even in the face of a deadly pandemic — will cause a long-term damage far greater than any purported benefit….

A degraded quality of life, particularly over time, itself generates its own risks of death. If the lockdown is prolonged, we can expect increases in deaths from cancer, cardiovascular disease, stroke, mental illness, and substance abuse….

Driven by panic at a crisis they ignored for too long, policy-makers are considering imposing mandatory prolonged social distancing measures, the cascading effects of which [will almost certainly] be worse than those of the virus itself….

The answer to this challenge is not to shrink back in panic but to take decisive action to fight the pandemic, while continuing to lead our lives.

Clear all bureaucracy so that vaccines can flourish – clinical trials to move quickly, diagnostic tests getting out there, without the usual bureaucratic entanglement.

And from an interview this same doctor gave the four days ago:

“The success that we had with Ebola monoclonal antibodies has people thinking this is the quickest way we can get a countermeasure for Covid-19,” said Adelja.

Now two private companies say they hope to have treatments for Covid-19 ready in record time.

Japan-based Takeda Pharmaceutical says its unit devoted to plasma-derived therapies could have a product ready for quick approval to fight the coronavirus. New York-based biotech Regeneron has said it can be ready to test hundreds of potential antibodies in Covid-19 patients by early summer. The company’s shares soared on the news even as the stock market as a whole tanked on pandemic fears.

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Amesh Adalja touches upon the very thing that will ultimately solve this crisis: human ingenuity and human intelligence, which are fully unleashed when the human mind and human body are left fully unshackled.

Both my websites have been glitchy the past several weeks, and then yesterday (or perhaps the night before) they both went down: offline completely.

I wasn’t aware of the problem for several hours, until a friend wrote and asked me if I knew The Journal Pulp was offline. I spent most of last night and all this morning trying to fix the problem. It wasn’t easy — primarily because I don’t know what I’m doing — but I believe I finally got her figured out. Nameservers, DNS records, hosting, change of servers, blah-blah-blah …

I thank you obsequiously for checking in with me, and please never doubt that I am eternally grateful for your readership and never take it for granted.

Would you like to hear absolute, irrefutable proof of the overwhelming superiority of laissez faire?

Here it is:

Two-hundred years ago and since the dawn of humankind, the entire world was poor.

Now, less than ten percent of the world is poor.

Two-hundred years ago and since the dawn of humankind, the very wealthiest people in the world didn’t have access to the quality of food, drink, medicine, shelter, transportation, lumen hours, entertainment, and much more that the poorest people in the developed world now have access to.

That is the total testament to the absolute superiority and success of laissez-faire, which is a system of freedom protected by law.

Concerning collectivism, one of the most popular myths going today is that Nordic countries, like Denmark and Sweden, are shining examples of the success of Democratic Socialism.

This myth is used to bolster the hip-and-faddish quasi-coolness of what is in actuality an embarrassingly antiquated and shabby ideology — an ideology of catastrophic failure. When, therefore, Danish Prime Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen told Harvard business students, in no uncertain terms, that Denmark is not a socialist country, no one in North America really believed him.

Why did they not believe him?

Because they didn’t want to believe him. 

Too much is at stake — entire world-views and lives constructed upon foundations of smoke-and-mirrors which when exposed will crumble into nothingness.

Still, the facts remain:

“I know that some people in the US associate the Nordic model with some sort of socialism,” Prime Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen said. “Therefore I would like to make one thing clear: Denmark is far from a socialist planned economy. Denmark is a market economy.”

He’s absolutely right.

The people who praise the Nordic countries for being socialist are not coincidentally the same sorts who praised Venezuela’s dictatorial regime — until it collapsed, that is.

I mean, of course, Noam Chomsky, Bernie Sanders, Jeremy Corbyn, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and all the other usual suspects.

Here is what none of them know or wish to know:

The Nordic countries are in many ways the diametric opposite of socialist:

They are leaders in the economic freedom index and ease of doing business according to the World Bank.

In virtually all Nordic countries, private property — the crux of laissez-faire — is guaranteed by law, and the individual’s savings are fully private and free from government control.

Most Nordic countries, including Denmark and Sweden, have lower corporate tax-rates than the United States.

In Nordic countries, the government does not dictate or impose mandatory schooling but simply administers and promotes choice between private and state-run services.

The Nordic countries are leaders in private banking, which finances the vast majority of economic activity — which is to say, over eighty percent.

The Nordic countries have become leaders in attracting capital, guaranteeing legal security and private investment, and they are also leaders in the privatization of inefficient state-owned entities.

Quoting Norwegian economist Per Bylund:

While very little known, Sweden’s welfare state only “worked” through the early 1970s thanks to its deliberately preserving capitalist institutions and expanding its scope at a slower rate than the country’s overall economic growth.

This changed in the 1970s, which necessitated several devaluations of the currency in only a few years intended to “boost” exports, and then a somewhat lost decade in the 1980s.

The welfare state finally imploded under financial problems in what can best be categorized as an economic depression in the early 1990s. The social democratic government resigned, government lost control (to the extent it ever had any), and politicians from all parties got together to enforce strict budget discipline (no deficits) and consistently cut back on the state’s generous welfare benefits. At the same time, pseudo-market forces were reintroduced through Friedmanite voucher systems, private health care was no longer prohibited, and the national pharmacy monopoly was privatized.

Even Sweden’s railway traffic is now carried out largely by private companies.

Also, since 2006, Sweden has also seen relatively extensive tax cuts. Of course, these measures were necessitated by the great crisis in and around 1992 — the state does not limit its own power unless it absolutely has to.

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And quoting the equally excellent economist Daniel Lacalle:

[In the Nordic Countries,] the public sector does not dictate the growth pattern or the way in which the economy should be run: it is generated from the private sector, which finances more than 60 percent of research and development, and government applies private-sector best practices of efficiency and transparency in the management of public services. In addition, public officials do not have a life-long position.

Nordic countries have carried out successful privatizations of state sectors, from telecommunications to electricity generation and distribution. Even the postal service and many forests were privatized.

They have a labor market that is among the most flexible in the world.

In these countries, private education is encouraged through school vouchers, not forced state-run schools.

There is also the fact that it is virtually impossible to copy in the US a model used in countries with fewer inhabitants than New York, but the most important difference is that choice, freedom and private initiative are the cornerstone of Nordic nations, pillars of a society that none of the populists want to implement.

No, socialism is not the model of the Nordic countries. And the interventionists that use these countries as their “model” have a completely different system in mind: State control.

I recommend you read Scandinavian Unexceptionalism by Nima Sanandaji or “The Secret of their Success”in “The Economist.”

The success of the Nordic countries has been to take pro-market measures, privatize inefficient sectors and guarantee private property, wealth creation as well as legal and investment security.

There is nothing Socialist about the Nordic Nations…. Socialism is the political and economic theory which defends that the means of production, distribution, and financing should be owned or controlled by the state. Nordic countries are NOT socialist. They are capitalist societies with a welfare state, like most capitalist nations have, by the way. The US as well. And they are the first ones that understood what we all know: socialism never works.

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Learn this, Reader — learn it, understand it, and remember it — and you will know something that the rest of the world does not know.