When it seemed that Britain’s Labour Party might turn the United Kingdom into a failed state during the 1970s, Margaret Thatcher transformed the Tories into a genuine conservative party and won election as Prime Minister. The Iron Lady’s tireless work reversing British socialism and returning England to freedom and prosperity remains an inspiration:
Is there an American Maggie Thatcher waiting in the wings to reverse our decline?
Where was this reporting in 2009 before the Obamacare catastrophe was enacted???
When challenged to identify a functional socialist nation, your average American leftist will usually offer Sweden. However, the American common wisdom of Sweden as a nordic socialist paradise would be wrong.
In a report on the recent Swedish fiscal and economic renaissance, The Economist notes that Sweden turned away from socialism two decades ago and fundamentally liberalized its government and economy in ways which American conservatives and libertarians can only dream:
The two decades from 1970 were a period of decline: [Sweden] was demoted from being the world’s fourth-richest in 1970 to 14th-richest in 1993, when the average Swede was poorer than the average Briton or Italian. The two decades from 1990 were a period of recovery: GDP growth between 1993 and 2010 averaged 2.7% a year and productivity 2.1% a year, compared with 1.9% and 1% respectively for the main 15 EU countries…
Sweden has reduced public spending as a proportion of GDP from 67% in 1993 to 49% today. It could soon have a smaller state than Britain. It has also cut the top marginal tax rate by 27 percentage points since 1983, to 57%, and scrapped a mare’s nest of taxes on property, gifts, wealth and inheritance. This year it is cutting the corporate-tax rate from 26.3% to 22%…
Its public debt fell from 70% of GDP in 1993 to 37% in 2010, and its budget moved from an 11% deficit to a surplus of 0.3% over the same period. This allowed a country with a small, open economy to recover quickly from the financial storm of 2007-08. Sweden has also put its pension system on a sound foundation, replacing a defined-benefit system with a defined-contribution one and making automatic adjustments for longer life expectancy.
Most daringly, it has introduced a universal system of school vouchers and invited private schools to compete with public ones. Private companies also vie with each other to provide state-funded health services and care for the elderly.
Amazingly, it is Sweden who offers our former “Land of the Free” the best roadmap to get off of Barack Obama’s superhighway to socialist decline.
Legend has it that Russian minister Grigory Potempkin erected fake villages along the route Empress Catharine was taking to the Crimea in 1787 to convince her highness that the area was actually developed. Since then, critics of government have used the term Potempkin villages to refer to government orders to create imaginary utopias.
One element of Barack Obama’s socialist “clean energy economy” program that I describe in my book Never Allow A Crisis To Go To Waste was the Environmental Protection Agency’s decree that gasoline refiners must use “cellulosic biofuels” made out of materials like grass under pain of paying hefty fines.
One not so small problem with the EPA order – cellulosic biofuels do not exist in commercial quantities nor are they likely to in the near future. This did not prevent EPA from levying the fines for failure to follow its decree, however.
This was too much even for the normally regulation friendly D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. In American Petroleum Institute v. EPA, the court held that EPA cannot punish gasoline refiners for failing to buy government ordered products which are unavailable for purchase. Unfortunately, the court had no problem with EPA ordering refiners to sell exotic biofuels made from sugar cane and the like without any actual science that these fuels benefit air quality.
One step forward toward freedom, one step back.
As the echoes of Barack Obama’s second inaugural speech and celebration of collectivist government fade away, the indispensable Zero Hedge blog asks if you can tell the difference between the rhetoric of French socialist President Francois Hollande and American socialist president Barack Obama.
The New York Times cannot fathom why health insurance rates for small businesses and individuals are soaring when Obamacare promised to “bend the cost curve down” and save the average household $2,500 a year:
Health insurance companies across the country are seeking and winning double-digit increases in premiums for some customers, even though one of the biggest objectives of the Obama administration’s health care law was to stem the rapid rise in insurance costs for consumers.
Particularly vulnerable to the high rates are small businesses and people who do not have employer-provided insurance and must buy it on their own.
In California, Aetna is proposing rate increases of as much as 22 percent, Anthem Blue Cross 26 percent and Blue Shield of California 20 percent for some of those policy holders, according to the insurers’ filings with the state for 2013…
In other states, like Florida and Ohio, insurers have been able to raise rates by at least 20 percent for some policy holders. The rate increases can amount to several hundred dollars a month…
Under the health care law, regulators are now required to review any request for a rate increase of 10 percent or more; the requests are posted on a federal Web site, healthcare.gov, along with regulators’ evaluations….According to the federal analysis, 36 percent of the requests to raise rates by 10 percent or more were found to be reasonable. Insurers withdrew 12 percent of those requests, 26 percent were modified and another 26 percent were found to be unreasonable.
It never occurs to the Times that Obamacare mandates are in large part driving the health insurance cost curve upward.
This is only the beginning.
Over a half trillion dollars in Obamacare taxes started hitting consumers on January 1. When the taxes the Democrat Congress imposed are not enough, the Obamacare bureaucracy unconstitutionally imposes new taxes and calls them “fees.”
Next year, Obamacare mandates that businesses and individuals either buy government designed health insurance or pay hefty fines.
The best laid plans of mice and socialists…
In the latest Gallup polling, 62% of self identified liberals have positive image of socialism, while 59% have a positive view of capitalism. That means at least 9% of liberals have positive images of both socialism and capitalism – diametrically opposite political economies.
Maybe these liberals are just really positive people.
Or maybe they are the epitome of low information human beings.
God save the Republic.
Outside the White House on election night:
The United States possesses the greatest oil and gas reserves in the world. Our oil shale in Colorado, Utah and Wyoming alone has three to five times the oil of Saudi Arabia.
In his second debate with GOP challenger Mitt Romney, President Barack Obama denied the fact that he had reduced oil and gas permits on federal lands by 15% and claimed instead that he had increased oil and gas production in the United States. “Now, I want to build on that,” Obama said. “And that means, yes, we still continue to open up new areas for drilling.”
Barack Obama lied to the American people.
Just days after the President was safely reelected and no longer had to answer to the voters, the Obama Interior Department decreed a rule closing off commercial development of our oil shale reserves on 1.6 million acres of federal land.
Elections have consequences.
