A heroic public servant speaks.
“Voters picked me because they wanted nursery schools, police and nurses, and not to buy loss-making car factories,”
From that bastion of heartless, free-market ideology, Sweden. Thanks to Richard Florida for the pointer.
READER COMMENTS
David R. Henderson
Feb 20 2009 at 5:42pm
Now let’s work on him to see the problem with government funding of nursery schools, police and nurses.
dearieme
Feb 20 2009 at 6:04pm
Saabotage.
Methinks
Feb 20 2009 at 6:05pm
David,
I think he’s a she (Maud).
She had me until she accused GM of “abandoning” Saab after saying Saab has been losing money. Killing a money losing division is the most prudent thing a company can do. Her comments smack of an expectation or even a demand for American taxpayers to subsidize a wealth destroying company located in Sweden.
kurt
Feb 20 2009 at 7:24pm
Then again, they don’t laugh at you when you drive a bicycle to work in Sweden. They simply don’t like cars.
Jacob Oost
Feb 21 2009 at 12:00am
The “Big Three” are dead to me, I’ll never buy a car from them. They have my money without my consent.
malavel
Feb 21 2009 at 5:11am
Methinks,
The accusation might just be the usual political pandering crap. It’s difficult to know what a politician really thinks. I’m happy as long as the decisions are good.
Jesper
Feb 21 2009 at 12:18pm
Kurt, you better believe we like cars. We have two car brands (Volvo and SAAB) and we live in a sparsely populated country. However, we don’t have mindless urban sprawl or more or less free gasoline. With some careful urban planning and high gasoline taxes, we have reasonable cars, reasonable commutes and don’t feel the need to flood oil producing countries with our money.
dearieme
Feb 21 2009 at 12:33pm
“[we] don’t feel the need to flood oil producing countries with our money”: choosing instead to flood the Baltic republics?
johnleemk
Feb 21 2009 at 5:03pm
David:
That’s rather surprising — while I can at least see where you’re coming from re education and healthcare (although I would disagree with you a bit), I thought it’s generally well-established that pure public goods like security need to be funded by some governing authority.
malavel
Feb 22 2009 at 12:40am
johnleemk,
Security isn’t a pure public good. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcho-Capitalism
Dan Weber
Feb 23 2009 at 5:58pm
The “Big Three” are dead to me, I’ll never buy a car from them. They have my money without my consent.
Even the one that hasn’t taken any government money?
Comments are closed.