I Am Numb and Angry

I am numb that I left my country to find freedom here and now, in my old age, it is taken away by Marxists again. I am so angry that words cannot describe my disappointment with Americans!

You are taking your good life and great country for granted and are now busy destroying it. What is wrong with you? Can you not learn from history, from the rest of us who lost everything to escape oppression?

Are you that bored with abundance that you must conjure up an imagined oppression in order to destroy your own country?

Shame on all of you who participate in this painful and disgusting charade, pretending daily that nothing is wrong, Joe is normal, and turning your backs to all the lawlessness and criminality.

Freedom of Speech, Just an Illusion?

I have been asked about the freedom of speech in my country where I was born and raised and how it compared with the freedom of speech we have in America. Is it just an illusion on paper under constant attack from the Marxist left which controls the country?

When Americans exercise their freedom of speech guaranteed in the Constitution, social media bans them under the rubric of “violation of their community standards.” Those standards must be very curious as Taliban jihadis are allowed on social platforms while conservatives and a former president are not.

The U.N. Declaration of Human Rights, which was adopted in 1948, states in article 19 that “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.”

The actual paragraphs of art. 19 are as follows:

1.      Everyone shall have the right to hold opinions without interference.

2.      Everyone shall have the right to freedom of expression; this right shall include freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers, either orally, in writing or in print, in the form of art, or through any other media of his choice.

3.      The exercise of the rights provided for in paragraph 2 of this article carries with it special duties and responsibilities. It may therefore be subject to certain restrictions, but these shall only be such as are provided by law and are necessary: (a) for respect of the rights or reputation of others; (b) for the protection of national security or of public order, or of public health or morals. First Principles on Human Rights: Freedom of Speech | The Heritage Foundation

Paragraph 3 places limitations on the freedom of speech.

George Orwell stated, “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”

Adolph Hitler allegedly said, “We’ve eliminated that conception of political freedom which holds that everybody has the right to say whatever comes into his head.”

The communist tyrant Ceausescu employed an army of security personnel and apparatchiks loyal to him who went to any length to squash the voices of those who tried to exercise their freedom of speech as outlined in the constitution.  Those who dared speak against socialism and its ruling communist party were tortured, forced to say, or write down incriminating statements, and jailed where they were eliminated by means that appeared as natural death.

If disinformation against them did not work, the tyrant silenced dissenters by having them beaten within an inch of their lives, “living corpses” as Pacepa wrote. Freedom of speech was just a line-item joke in the constitution.

Lt. Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa wrote in his book, Red Horizons, that Ceausescu added radiation to his deadly arsenal against those he deemed “inconvenient” who needed their freedom of speech curtailed permanently. He gave the order “Radu” for those slated to be irradiated. “The radiation dosage was said to generate lethal forms of cancer.” (p. 146)

The constitution guaranteed freedom of speech but people were terrified to exercise it even around their immediate or extended family. They never knew who would turn them in for extra rations of food.

How much freedom of speech did citizens have?

None, when one considers the fact that every citizen had to submit a handwriting sample to the authorities and had to register and turn in on demand any typewriters they owned if the authorities deemed necessary that such machines should be confiscated.

None, if one considers that those who were lucky enough to have telephones, the speakers were bugged. Unlike today, when technology does the spying on the population, back then the centralized socialist/communist government had to engage an entire army of spies and informers to curtail the peoples’ freedom of speech and assembly.

Art. 30 in the Romanian constitution today guarantees the following:

1.      Freedom to express thoughts, opinions, beliefs, and the freedom to create anything via speech, images, sounds, or other means of communication in public.

2.      Censorship of any kind is forbidden.

3.      Freedom of the press and freedom to establish publications.

4.      No publication can be suppressed.

5.      The means of communication in mass must disclose the source of finance.

6.      Freedom of expression cannot prejudice the dignity, honor, private life of a person, or their right to their own image.

7.      It is forbidden to defame the country and the nation; to urge war of aggression; nation hate, racist hate, class hate, religious hate, incitement to discriminate, incitement to territorial separatism, public violence; obscene manifestations against good morals.

8.      Civil responsibility for public information falls on the editor, the creator, the author, the organizer of the artistic manifestation, the owner of the means of production of such information, the radio station, the tv station, etc.

According to article 30 it appears that freedom of speech, although guaranteed in words, is not that free at all, it does contain many “caveats,” specific stipulations, conditions, or limitations.

Professor Marius Visovan, a priest, wrote about the anti-communist commemorative plaque displayed at the “Dragos-Voda” high school; because of current political correctness, the leftist way to squash freedom of speech, the commemorative plaque had been removed. It was a painful realization that those who were jailed, suffered, and died during the communist regime “were once again slapped in the face.”

Visovan bemoaned the fact that there is freedom of speech to contest the decisions of current politicians, but nobody seems to listen or is willing to redress the grievances of the population. What good is the stated freedom of speech if people are shouting in the wind?

Through the Memorial of the Victims of Communism from Sighet, Maramures, Romanians are learning slowly what happened to their nation during the communist rule of the tyrant Ceausescu. Why slowly? After 1990, according to Prof. Visovan, with one television station at that time, strongly dominated by neo-communists, with very few independent press outlets, Romanian citizens were clamoring for uncensored information.  

The former political prisoners alive then asked for their rights to express publicly the truth about communism. But the official narrative was still the communist propaganda of four decades prior. Slowly, since the 1989’s revolution and the “fall” of communism, information and freedom of speech are dominated and controlled by the globalist-funded mass media, using the same talking points that America is using today.

I remember my high school history teacher, a Jewish lady, who was eventually allowed to flee to Israel under Ceausescu’s agreement that Jews could buy their freedom in dollars out of the oppressive communism we lived under.

She did not allow us to ask many questions when we studied certain “inconvenient” historical facts that the communist party tried very hard to erase from reality or conceal and misrepresent. She would give us a verbal warning which we learned to heed under the guise of, you are treading in dangerous territory for you. The verbal warning was, “democracy has gone to your heads.”

Her meaning was, that we should not dare try to express orally and in writing the “rights” we had under the constitution which the communist party changed at will, or else we and our parents would be disappeared in the many prisons and gulags the commies had spread around the country. The communist freedom of speech was just a fairy tale.

 

Inflation and the Emperor Who Planted Cabbages

Invest in inflation. It’s the only thing going up. – Will Rogers

As Americans are struggling with inflation to pay their bills, buy food, gasoline, and other necessities such as medications and rent, few have the knowledge to point to the culprits of such accelerated overall price increases:

-          - the inept government run by Democrats at the federal level

-          -  the production and supply chain disruption, bankruptcies, forced unemployment, and generous welfare to stay home, all caused by the continuous Democrat lockdowns and political fear posturing over a flu virus

-          - Joe Biden’s disastrous reversal of anything relating to fossil fuel production which escalated gas prices and made America once again dependent on foreign oil supply

-          - the Green New Deal which is destroying the economy

-          - Congress’ out of control spending of trillions of dollars printed ad nauseam, with no  backing up of goods or services

Inflation is an ancient enemy, with its cousin, stagflation, inflation while the economy is stagnating. Inflation measures via the consumer price index (CPI) the rising prices of goods and services which leads to a decrease in the purchasing power of the dollar. The same dollar used to buy a basket of goods today will buy a smaller basket due to rising prices.

The consumer price index (CPI) calculated by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) uses a weighted average of various goods and services Americans buy, i.e., food, shelter, transportation, doctors, dentists, medicines, and is differently gauged for rural v. urban inhabitants.

The method does not accurately reflect price increases as Americans use some services more than others, and housing costs, healthcare, and education vary from region to region. The CPI calculation methodology has changed more than twenty times and is still not an accurate measure of inflation.

What causes inflation?

-          Consumer demand for goods is much larger than supply, pushing prices of supply available up – see the case of new cars, the supply is much lower due to an alleged microchip shortage, therefore dealers add an average of $5,000 to the price of new cars

-          Increase in supply of money and credit to consumers – the government spending and printing money more freely

-          Price of goods increase because of higher production costs due to higher price of raw materials and higher employee wages

-          Wage push inflation – people expect inflation rates to continue (Federal Reserve target of keeping inflation at 2 percent rate per year) so employers increase wages, followed by increased consumption rates, which pushes prices of goods and services up.

-          Most economists agree that one compelling cause of inflation is the money supply that expands too rapidly, i.e., printing too much money.

The buying power of the dollar declines rapidly during high inflation. A classic example of galloping inflation is the German mark. In 1918 at the Armistice, one mark bought the same amount of goods and services as 726 million marks in 1923, just five years later. Burning paper money was cheaper than buying firewood.

Inflation is not bad for debtors; if you earn $1,000 you may have borrowed five years ago, is much easier. What you pay back the lender, the $1,000 buys less than it did when you borrowed it.

There was a time when breaking the law and causing inflation resulted in the ultimate punishment – death. To be more specific, Roman Emperor Diocletian, to curb rising inflation, devised a set of regulations in 301 A.D. Anyone caught defying his edict was killed.

Emperor Diocletian listed 1,000 items with fixed prices that could not exceed a certain maximum price, i.e., food, raw materials textiles, wages, and transportation. Anyone caught charging more for his listed items or trying to sell their wares on the black market for higher prices would be summarily executed without any benefit of a trial.

How bad was this inflation that Emperor Diocletian was trying to shrink? According to historians, the inflation rate was 1,000 percent during a period of 17 years. Reducing money printing was one way to deal with inflation. The government of that time tried to deal with the escalating inflation by debasing the currency so that instead of coins minted from precious metals, coinage was made mostly of copper.

But, debasing the currency, making it inferior in metal quality was a mistake, it did not go unnoticed to merchants who began to demand higher prices for the goods they sold and to citizens who demanded more wages for their work, resulting in more inflation.

But what caused this galloping inflation to being with? A half century of political turmoil, instability, non-stop warfare with the barbarians, the capture of the previous emperor, Valerian, by the barbarians in 259 A.D. Speculators caused a financial crash in which people hurriedly turned their available cash into goods.

Diocletian’s government failed to put blame on its shortcomings in dealing with “speculators who gambled on grain futures.” It is, however, written in the preamble of Diocletian’s edict, that those responsible were “men who have nothing better to do than carve up for their own advantage the benefits sent by the gods … men who are themselves swimming in a wealth that would satisfy a whole people, who think only of their gain and their percentage.”

Diocletian, a man of low birth, was proclaimed Emperor at the age of thirty-nine by his troops. He found out painfully that he could not reduce inflation by legislation – people, who saw their money devalued again, rushed to stockpile all the goods they could find and afford before their money lost value even more.

The black market flourished, one of the unintended consequences of bad price and income government policies. Emperor Diocletian managed to keep the empire together for a while and was one of the few leaders of that time able to retire and to eventually die in his own bed, a rare feat for emperors. At his villa in Salona, the modern Yugoslav town of Split, he grew cabbages. When approached to return to the life of command, he is alleged to have said, “if you could only see my cabbages, which I planted with my own hands….”

People in our modern economy hurry at times to exchange their available cash for goods they hoard during unstable times of fear and shaky economy caused by terrible government leadership.

Yogi Berra is famously alleged to have said, “A nickel ain’t worth a dime anymore.” Inflation does that to currencies. Of course, you could use the barter system and exchange goods for goods. The colonists used bullets and gunpowder as a medium of exchange and one town famously made money out of rectangles of wood. Colonists also cut up coins to make change, making a half coin worth four bits and a quarter coin two bits.

Cash will eventually become obsolete, replaced by chipped cards, and controlled entirely by government via technology. We are unsure how they would devalue balances to express inflation, but we are certain that they will immediately collect all taxes owed, and unless we do as they say, our electronic balances will be inaccessible to us.

A Soap Bar and a Lesson Missed

I was browsing through L’Occitane one day, looking for a bar of soap. Among the many offerings, I noticed three lovely and fragrant bars which were labeled shampoo soap. The fragrance brought back memories of the factory in Nice, France, which I had visited years ago on a trip to Europe with my students.

Making conversation, always with a teacher’s purpose in mind, I told the young woman helping me that we used to wash our hair in my country with cheap soap made by the socialist centralized economy run by the Communist Party and their only soap available left a nasty whitish residue on the hair shaft, which no amount of rinsing could wash off, and the soap had a distinctive and unpleasant odor. We used the same soap to launder our clothes by hand as we did not have washers and dryers, nor could we have afforded them.

The young woman asked politely curious why we would wash hair with soap, why not use shampoo and conditioner?

When I replied that shampoo and conditioners did not exist in a centrally planned socialist economy, she looked at me in disbelief, as if I had just fallen off to Earth from an alien planet.

I knew shampoos existed back then because I saw foreign tourists using shampoo at the outdoor showers by the Black Sea and the wind carried the fragrance. They came in individual one wash use in red plastic squares, not bottles, quite convenient for travel.

Hotel room cleaners would get occasionally lucky when a foreign tourist would leave behind fragrant shampoo squares and partially used bars of soap. It was better than a monetary tip to take home such luxuries.  

I could see light bulbs trying to flicker in her brain but she could not comprehend such impoverished reality in her abundant and privileged capitalist lifestyle, and that the socialism I escaped from and she worshipped, could deprive people of simple things like shampoo and fragrant soap.

She would not understand the story of a Hungarian friend who visited family for the first time in 1970 in Budapest and could not find socks anywhere. Americans can go to any store and find a myriad of choices of socks to pick from. People living under oppressive socialist planned economies had to learn to knit their own socks, sweaters, gloves, shawls, make their own clothes, or do without. There were not many choices of anything in government-run communist stores.

It was pointless to explain to her that soap and shampoo were the least of our worries, that food and necessities, medicine, and other basics like toilet paper were nowhere to be found unless you stood in line every day in hopes of finding something to purchase that you needed.

Before the lockdown, I had given to one of my doctors a copy of my book, Echoes of Communism, and he did not make any commentary about it. On a return visit months later, when the lockdown was in full swing and the grocery stores were rather empty and imposing limits on many things, the same doctor commented that he finally understood the dearth of basics under communism when his wife went to their local Giant grocery store and could not find basics. He said, they became believers. But, as soon as the supply of food improved, they returned to their leftist worship of the socialist ideology.

The moral of the story is that, unless you suffer the lengthy deprivation and indignities of a socialist economy like Venezuela’s and Cuba’s, you are not going to believe that your abundant way of life that you have under a capitalist economy, will disappear rapidly under a socialist, centrally mis-planned economy, run by one party rule, whose leaders lie to you that everything they do is for the common good and it is the best.

 

 

Vaccine Passports to Participate in Society?

Many doctors and scientists with long bona fides have been suppressed by the media in general, the main stream, as well as the social media dominated by four giants; if they diverge from the controlled narrative of taking a vaccine at all costs, they will be excluded forcibly and entirely from society.

France has taken the draconian medical measures further, by hiring police to demand vaccination papers from café goers on the streets of Paris. Australia and New Zealand are under some sort of Orwellian medical martial law.

Never since Dr. Josef Mengele criminal “experiments” on humans in Auschwitz’s concentration camp have people been experimented on without their consent and full disclosure of the procedure, its goal, and its chemical content.

What makes this global vaccination a politically controlled action forced on societies more insidious is the fact that there are successful treatments for Covid-19 with FDA approved drugs whereas the vaccines are experimental and quite rushed mRNA treatments approved only for emergency use, unlike any other vaccines previously developed over decades that went through thorough and lengthy trials over many years. The long-term effect of this experimentation is not known and the short-term effects are adding up.

Dr. Dan Stark, a family medicine practicing physician, addressed the Mt. Vernon, Indiana, Community School Corporation on August 7, 2021, over the futility of mask mandates and Covid-19 protocols.

He explained that “everything being recommended by the CDC and the State Board of Health is actually contrary to all the rules of science” and are “counterfactual.” Dr. Dan Stock's Presentation to the Mt. Vernon School Board in Indiana Over The Futility of Mask Mandates and Covid-19 Protocols (hancockcountypatriots.blogspot.com)

Citing literature from CDC and NIH sponsored studies, that he included in a flash drive which he presented to the board prior to his speech, he explained that the coronavirus and all other respiratory viruses are spread by aerosol particles which are “small enough to go through every mask.”

Respiratory viruses, he said, target weakened immune systems in winter, and cause “symptomatic disease because they cannot be filtered out and they have animal reservoirs.”

“No one can make this virus go away. The CDC has managed to convince everybody that we can handle this like we did smallpox where we could make a virus go away.” But the smallpox only infected humans, it had no animal reservoirs, he said.

Dr. Stark stated that the corona virus cannot disappear just like humans could not eradicate influenza, the common cold, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) which causes serious illness in young children, adenoviral respiratory syndromes, or any other virus that has animal reservoirs.

Dr. Stark asked the pointed question, “why is this vaccine that is supposedly so effective having a breakout in the middle of summer when respiratory viral syndromes don’t do that” and the levels of vitamin D are the highest?

According to him, every coronavirus study done on animals after the SARS outbreak and on respiratory syncytial virus, resulted in a condition called “antibody mediated viral enhancement.”

A respiratory virus “which has a low pathogenicity rate caused the immune system to actually fight the virus wrong and let the virus become worse than it would with native infection.” How is that possible? “If the antibody’s binding process goes wrong, it may facilitate the virus’ entry into the host cell instead of preventing it.” He added, “Seventy-five percent of people who had Covid-19 positive symptom cases in Barnstable, Massachusetts outbreak were fully vaccinated.”

To illustrate that you cannot stop the spread, Dr. Stark described the 2014 outbreak of mumps in the National Hockey League. Those unvaccinated or with unknown vaccine status came down with mumps. A good argument for vaccination, however, half of those who came down with mumps had no contact with unvaccinated or unknown vaccine status individuals, which means that they got infected from the vaccinated individuals.

Dr. Stark explained that his Covid-19 infected patients who were treated with Vitamin D, Ivermectin, and zinc, improved and did not necessitate hospitalization. People who had levels of 25 hydroxy Vitamin D higher than 55 had a much lower risk of contracting Covid-19.

Studies show that people who have recovered from Covid-19, said Dr. Stark, “got no benefit from vaccination at all, no reduction in symptoms, no reduction in hospitalization, and suffered two to four times the rate of side effects if they were subsequently vaccinated.”

Parents and all citizens should demand answers to important questions:

-          Should governments and school boards continue to make policies to mask up our children and vaccinate them, demand vaccine passports from humans in order to allow them to participate in society, 20 months after the disease has spread around the globe?

-          How long must we do this and what kind of irreversible damage are we doing to our children and to the population at large in the long-run?

-          Whatever happened to real science and herd immunity instead of science for political gain and control?

-          How accurate are the tests to detect exposure to the Covid-19 virus?

-          Why continue to lockdown healthy populations when lockdowns are for the sick?

-          Why bribe and force the population into submission if it is so good?

-          Why the heavy non-stop advertising and the shutting down of any scientific discussion except from the government?

At the end of the day, contrary to what we are told from the science of the left, real science (scientia, Latin for “knowledge) is never settled, is not a consensus, but a continuous search for truth, improvement, better ways and new ideas. Science builds on previous knowledge and organizes new knowledge in a factual and well-tested way.

 

The Iliad and the Odyssey

As my husband is revisiting the classics for personal literary enrichment, I was wondering if people really knew or know today precisely who the writer of the Iliad and of the Odyssey was. The two masterpieces were considered superb literature from the time when they were written down, presumably in the eighth century B.C., and were ascribed to the poet Greeks called “Homer.”

The Iliad vividly described the 10-year war between the Greeks and the Trojans. At its conclusion, Troy was infiltrated by Greek soldiers who hid in a wooden horse. Once inside the fortress, the Greek soldiers emerged from the wooden horse at night, opened the city gates and set fire to Troy, destroying the city. Nobody is quite sure how large the horse was, or how many soldiers were able to hide inside the horse.

Archeologists have argued over the potential existence of such Trojan horse and some historians even go as far as attributing wooden planks found in Turkey, 15 ft in length, to such a wooden horse, although it could have been the remains of a ship.

The famous Italian painter Giovanni Tiepolo used his enormous talent to bring to life the Trojan horse being dragged with ropes through the city streets by the Trojans. The circa 1760 oil on canvas painting hangs in the National Gallery in London.

But who was Homer? The ancient Greeks called the poet Homer, but many doubt that the epic stories are the literary work of just one person or that he really was called Homer, this mythical writer who has been venerated and his work dissected and studied for almost three thousand years.

There is a seventh or sixth century B.C. poem that refers to “a blind man living in Chios,” an island on the Aegean Sea. Greeks do recognize that Homer was a street performer of oral poetry, a “singer.” These “singers” memorized certain stories that most people have heard or invented new ones on the spot as they were paid by listeners.

Over time, more elements were added to the oral tradition and to certain stories, recognized by specific metric patterns and repetitions of certain word combinations. Improvisation by more talented “singers,” added a level of mystery and enchantment to some lengthy stories.

According to scholars, the Greeks were illiterate and passed on stories through oral traditions only. They did not have an alphabet until the middle of the eighth century B.C. when they acquired it from the Phoenicians with whom they traded. The Phoenicians, who lived on the eastern side of the Mediterranean, in the Levant region, area known today as Lebanon (Tyre was the capital), invented their alphabet in the 1200 B.C.

When the Iliad and the Odyssey were finally written down, it would have contained years of refinements, flourishes, and additions by various “singers” who used their talents to enchant listeners, paying customers who were surely mesmerized by the creative and imaginative storytelling.

“Scholars agree that both poems contain all the ingredients of orally transmitted poetry.”

The Odyssey describes the ten-year meandering journey of Odysseus at the end of the Trojan War. Scholars think that Scylla and Charybdis represent the straits of Messina but cannot agree where Circe Island was.

A map representing the storied meanderings of Odysseus from Troy to his birthplace, Ithaca, wanders across the sea, around Sicily, to Cape Circeio (Circe’s home) in western mid-part of today’s Italy, back and forth through the tip of Italy, twice above Sicily, and three times across the Ionian Sea towards Greece and finally to Greece.

The details most scholars agree on is that the mythical Odysseus left Troy and returned to his birthplace in Greece, Ithaca. Everything else in-between is often left to individual interpretation.

Vase paintings depict Odysseus putting out the eye of the Cyclopes and the sirens trying to lure away Odysseus who is tied to the ship’s mast.

Because tales from the Trojan War and from Odysseus’ meanderings seem to refer to different time periods, and to earlier times, it is safe to say that different “singers” who told shorter stories contributed to the epics.

Some scholars believe that, at the time that the alphabet was borrowed from the Phoenicians, a poet (“singer”) emerged who used individual stories and created a compendium of two much larger stories called epics and either wrote them down himself or commissioned scribes to do so. Another hypothesis considers that perhaps there were two such “Homers” who “wrote” the Iliad and the Odyssey.

The possibility arises from the fact that the language in the Odyssey seems typical of a later period than the language of the Iliad. The Iliad focuses on a few days of brutal war, whereas the Odyssey focuses on ten years of travel and adventure of one man and his crew across the seas, involving fantastical beings and magical deeds.

The 19the century novelist Samuel Butler thought that, unlike the brutal and martial story of the Iliad, the Odyssey was written by a woman since it did not contain topics of war at all.

No matter how many “singers” contributed to the Homeric epics, in the end, one or perhaps two individuals which scholars like to call “Homer,” have put them all together into two separate but unified stories. We will never know exactly as “no manuscript earlier than the third century B.C. survives.”

 

Is Sweden the Beacon of Democratic Socialism?

Why are generations of young Americans enamored with socialism as a better alternative to capitalism when everything in their abundant and privileged lives comes from free market capitalism?

Socialism, the state’s ownership of the means of production, production planning, and distribution, has been repackaged by clever Marxists like Bernie Sanders and AOC under the name of Democratic Socialism, a term borrowed from Sweden to make socialism more attractive and palatable to Marxist useful idiots who do not understand much economics or history, even those with college degrees.

Young generations want to have what 10.29 million (2019) Swedish citizens have – a “robust” welfare for all without any labor effort on their part, they would stay at home and find themselves. What is the economic reality though behind free stuff? Taxpayers must foot the bill through heavier taxation.

Starting in the 1970s, for twenty years Sweden tried to maintain capitalism with a generous welfare state, a “bridging policy,” with disastrous unintended consequences – high inflation, “overheated real estate and financial markets, a negative real rate of interest” followed by a recession and high unemployment.

Lou Perez, a writer, actor, and producer, interviewed two Swedish officials, asking them about their mythical Democratic Socialism. Sweden today is Democratic but not Socialist, he was told. Johan Norberg, a libertarian economist from the Cato Institute, indicated that Sweden is a “capitalist economy based on free market and open trade with a fair among of government redistribution of the proceeds.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QcX6BUZlEw4

Sweden experimented with socialism between 1970-1990. “It ended in a spectacular failure. Yet, all of you seem to remember only these 20 years,” said Norberg.  Prior to the experiment, Sweden was quite wealthy as a country due to its decades of competitive capitalist business models, low taxation, remaining neutral during WWII, and probably trading with both sides of the conflict.

The socialist experiment implemented many programs that transformed Sweden in the 1970s into one of “the most advanced welfare society that had ever existed.” Presided over by prime minister Olof Palme, the public sector’s share of GDP increased by 50 percent. The Swedish welfare state established a health insurance system, parents’ allowances for daycare for all, free abortion, free education for six years, five weeks paid vacation, retirement age lowered from 67 to 65, and generous pensions of two-thirds of the highest earning fifteen years of work.

This universal welfare society was a centrally planned economy run by the state which included economic policies, taxation, trade, monetary policy, and fiscal policy. The system in place was financed, owned, and run by the state. The state controlled pension funds and built one million housing units with state-guaranteed loans for a population of eight million. The bureaucracy to oversee all these state-controlled organizations was enormous.

According to Kjell Östberg, for 40 years Sweden was controlled by the social democratic party; it had more than one million members, dominating most of Sweden’s large cities.  The labor force was organized around the blue-collar workers’ union LO, to the tune of 90 percent of the workforce.

Social democrats influenced life from cradle to grave. They held 45-50 percent of the seats in Parliament. In their youth, half of the members of government had belonged to the blue-collar union LO.

Swedish citizens were shaped into equality, socially and economically, by the heavy influence, funding, and control of the state:

-          Young people met at youth associations and dances in People’s Parks, remarkably like the organization of the communist youth in the Soviet bloc

-          Citizens bought apartments in the cooperative housing association called HSB, not unlike the Soviet style

-          Swedes bought food at Konsum and gasoline at the cooperative OK gas stations

-          Workers were trade union members, corporate members of LO

-          Married men were active in the workers’ commune, just like Soviet life

-          Married women were members in the social-democratic women’s organization

-          Families watched movies at the People’s House, produced by studios owned by the workers’ movement,  definitely a déjà vu for those who lived under Soviet socialism

-          Swedes could join study circles facilitated by the Workers’ Educational Association

-          Citizens got their news from the party’s many newspapers

-          Children participated in activities organized by the Young Eagles

-          Retirees joined the PRO organization

-          People were buried by Fonus, the worker’s movement funeral home

-          Abortions were free and on demand

-          All children were enrolled in free public childcare

-          The parents’ insurance gave families seven months of leave from work with full pay from the state insurance ministry; mother and father had to decide how they split the seven months of leave

-          Education was “democratized” – nine years of primary education, high school, free teaching materials, free school meals, doubled child benefits payments given to all children up to the age of sixteen and then extended to high school, all universities were run by the state, tuition was free, and students received aid for living expenses (government grants and loans payable within 20 years)

-          Sick pay guaranteed employees 90 percent of their wages

-          Local health centers owned by the state charged 7 SEK ($1) per visit

-          Hospital care was paid by state health insurance

-          Pharmacies and parts of the medical industry were also controlled by the state

-          State communal housing companies built and owned the new units

-          Higher rents were subsidized by the state via a generous housing allowance

Was Sweden Headed Toward Socialism in the 1970s? (jacobinmag.com)

Politicians had established a government ownership of business. The size of the government doubled, its share of the GDP also doubled, taxes increased, and the state regulated everything. For twenty years of heavy socialism, 1970-1990, the wealth of Sweden declined. The experiment with Democratic Socialism failed because “the policies were perverse, unsustainable, and absurd,” wrote the Democrat Socialist Minister of Finance Kjell-Olof Feldt.

To begin the roll back of the socialist welfare state, the size of government was reduced, markets and industries were deregulated, and taxes were decreased; the economy began to flourish again.

Andreas Bergh, economist, stated that “around 1980, the marginal income tax was at its highest, around 90 percent.” Corporations refused to pay such high taxes and moved their income and businesses to other countries. The high tax rates resulted in high loss of tax revenue as corporations found new ways to plan for tax avoidance. Outsourcing and corporate tax evasion became the norm. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QcX6BUZlEw4

Johan Norberg said that the Swedish tax system does not “squeeze the rich, it squeezes the poor” because they and the middle class do pay their taxes. They do not move their households to other countries, they do not have tax lawyers, and they do not have huge deductions.

According to Norberg, most income tax payments in Sweden come from payroll tax of 30 percent and local regional income tax also of 30 percent. Both these taxes are flat, not progressive. There are also excise taxes and VAT (ad valorem) tax of 25 percent.

Compare that to the two American payroll taxes, Social Security payroll tax of 12.4 percent and the Medicare payroll tax of 2.9 percent. Our state taxes vary but are much lower and sales taxes are, on the average, no higher than 10 percent. Our federal taxes combined with the state taxes are well below the 60 percent that Swedish citizen pay. We do have excise taxes that are included in the price of a product or service.

The self-identified American democrat socialists conveniently remember only the twenty-year period when Sweden was the most generous socialist welfare state on the planet. It did not go so well for them, and they eventually reversed course.

American democrat socialists want to emulate Sweden’s twenty years of incredible welfare. All blue states have extremely high tax rates and struggle to fund their generous welfare programs, usually taking from the productive and giving to the unproductive and illegal, and expecting to be bailed out by federal grant-in-aid and omnibus bills.

Bruce Bawer, a prolific bestselling author, wrote in 2020, “the fact remains that Swedes are, by nature, collectivist, statist, consensus-oriented, and anti-individualistic – scared to challenge received opinion and eager to join in ostracizing those who do.” Whitewashing the Swedish Nightmare - American Renaissance (amren.com)