Reply #57: Sweden is a small country

[Cats Against Frist]

Sweden has fewer people than CHICAGO. That's my main argument -- minarchy, before, anarchy.

On that kind of level, I think those types of policies are more workable and apt. Plus, the Swedish have CULTURAL mores that enable them to be so goddamned sensible -- lagom and push-ups, toward the sun, every morning...

I lived in Stockholm, and though I think that $10/mo. cell phones, subsidized computers, 30-hour work weeks and lots of gravlax is the place I want to be, there are some drawbacks to the Swedish model. The first, being that I still think it covers too many people. The second, that they're so egalitarain that they're going to destroy their society with their immigration policies, that there is an unspoken caste system that has a ghost of Sovietism as its inspiration, and the ugliest urban sprawls, in the cities, that make the storefront of a Barnes & Noble look like the gates of heaven. Not to mention that they ran one of the best filmmakers in human history, out of the country, because they were going to tax his brilliance at 90 percent.

There's a lot of payola going on there, too -- and the only thing that keeps the whole thing together is, as I said, their cultural values, which are not only being chipped away by immigration policies, but by the influx of Western Capitalism. Swedes are not immune -- they are getting fat off McDonalds, like every other European country, and they have as much American television available, as we do.

Don't get me wrong, though -- I love it. I'm trying to get a Fullbright, to go back. And I do envy the fact that they can, though sometimes tenuously, hold a more communitarian society together, and still maintain one of the highest standards of living and life expectancy statistics, in the entire world.