Utopia, you are standing in it!

In Part I of our series on Socialism in the Modern World, we looked at the tragic story of Venezuela.

Today, we’re going to look at what we can learn from the Nordic nations. And the first thing to understand, as I explain in this interview, is that these nations are only socialist if the definition is watered down.

As I noted in the interview, real socialism is based on government ownership and control of the “means of production.” But Nordic countries don’t have government-owned factories, government-controlled allocation of resources, or government regulation of prices.

In other words, those nations are not socialist (government ownership), they’re not fascist (government control), and they’re not even corporatist (cronyism).

So what are they?

In a column for the Washington Post, Max Boot accurately describes them as free-market welfare states.

…rigging elections and locking up or killing political opponents. This is one model…

Australia’s energy policy is a self-inflicted calamity driven by an obsession with intermittent wind and solar. Only a complete collapse of the grid will cause those who pretend to govern us to get a grip. But, thankfully, a complete ‘system black’ is on the cards this coming summer.

The Federal Energy Minister, Angus Taylor has been reduced to waffling about ‘green’ hydrogen and has been otherwise co-opted by rent-seekers, merrily profiting at the expense of every productive industry, business and household.

With a Federal election looming – against the backdrop of an unfolding power supply and pricing disaster – you might expect Taylor and Scott Morrison, his PM, to start advancing the case for nuclear power in this country. But these characters sound more like spin doctors for the wind and solar industries than champions of industry, business and trade. Neither of them is game to use the ‘N’ word…

I want people to understand the intellectual and empirical case against socialism, as summarized in my three-part series (Part I, Part II, and Part III).

But I also recognize that most people aren’t that excited about nerdy economic-themed articles.

Which is why I also use satire as a weapon against collectivism. And updating our collection of collectivism humor is the focus of today’s column.

Our first item combines economic issues such as tax rates and redistribution with basic notions of fairness (properly defined).

Our second item points out how socialists are generally huge hypocrites.

Once they accumulate some money, they magically decide that their knee-jerk policy of “tax the rich” somehow only applies to the people who have even more than they do.

Needless to say, they almost never voluntarily give away their money, either to government or directly to poor people.

Our third bit of…

This is a very good video, but there is one vital point missing. Environmentalist groups are phenomenally wealthy and could easily lobby to get the laws mentioned by the PERC representative changed. So the million dollar question is: “Why don’t they?”

PHOTO CREDIT: View along Copper Creek Trail, Kings Canyon National Park, California By Tom Hilton – Flickr, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=62647902

Prime Minister Trudeau advised Governor General Mary Simon to dissolve the 43^rd Parliament of Canada and issue the writs of election on 15 August 2021. The Privy Council Office marked the occasion by releasing another edition of its Guidelines on the Conduct of Ministers, Ministers of State, Exempt Staff and Public Servants During an Election – naturally, in HTML alone, and using the same URL as the earlier editions from 2019 and 2015, now over-ridden and consigned to Internet oblivion. This document contains guidance on the Caretaker Convention.