Tag Archives: Europe

News

Twenty years of fiscal conservatism in Sweden: has it worked?

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Map of Europe
Map of Europe

From Investors Business Daily, a story about about a nation that changed course – and won big.

Excerpt:

The turnaround has been driven in no small part by the election of Fredrik Reinfeldt as prime minister in 2006. He took office in October of that year and by January of 2007, tax-cutting had begun. The Reinfeldt government also cut welfare spending — a form of austerity — and began to deregulate the economy.

[…][A]s Finance Minister Anders Borg told the Spectator, the Reinfeldt government was simply continuing the last 20 years of reform.

[…]Sweden fell into recession in 2008 and 2009, as did many developed nations. But it’s pulled strongly out of the decline, posting GDP gains of 6.1% in 2010 and 3.9% last year, when it ranked at the top in Europe’s list of fastest-growing economies.

[…]Under Borg, Sweden handled the downturn in the most un-European way. “While most countries in Europe borrowed massively, Borg did not. Since becoming Sweden’s finance minister, his mission has been to pare back government. His ‘stimulus’ was a permanent tax cut,” Fraser Nelson wrote last month in the Spectator.

Borg strongly opposed the Keynesian solution, which the left continues to advance while it inveighs against an austerity that has yet to be implemented.

He also refused to resort to the trickery of a stimulus, instead cutting the taxes that he knew were hindering entrepreneurs from giving the economy the kick it needed.

The country needed innovators and capitalists — “the source of job creation,” says Borg — and he did what he had to, to attract new ones and to keep those already there from leaving.

During Sweden’s decline into a welfare state, it became, as Borg told the Spectator, “a textbook case of European economic sclerosis” punished by “very high taxes and huge regulatory burden.”

That lasted until the 1990s, when the nation realized it had to return to the market policies that had made it rich prior to the onset of its cradle-to-grave coddling.

How much further can Borg and Reinfeldt take their reforms? Will voters ask them to come back and complete the job?

After all, it’s not over. Though it continues to fall, Sweden’s government debt as a share of GDP is still too high at 38.4%. And while it’s dipped below 45% for the first time in decades, the country’s tax-to-GDP ratio is still far too steep.

Despite this unfinished business, Sweden is still moving in the right direction. We might be able to say that about America after the 2013 Inauguration Day. But we can’t say that now.

If liberals are so smart, why can’t they take time off from taxing, spending and buying votes, in order to look at countries that are having economic success? Isn’t it “smart policy” to do what works? Why listen to Hollywood celebrities and people with journalism degrees when we can just do what has been proven to work? It’s not like what we are doing now is working.

News

Islam, rape, and sex-trafficking in European countries

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Here’s a helpful guide to practical Islam from the UK Telegraph.

Full text:

If you want an insight into how cowardly public debate in Britain has become, look no further than the controversy over the Rochdale Asian sex gang. The discussion about the despicable crimes committed by these eight Pakistanis and one Afghani has revealed extraordinary levels of relativism and self-censorship in modern Britain. Indeed, it seems it is now virtually impossible to have a serious discussion about problematic cultural attitudes, because to do so would apparently offend minorities and, even worse, stir up the passions of the latently racist white masses. And so, in the name of protecting Muslim communities’ sensitivities and dampening down white working-class people’s alleged savagery, we keep quiet about certain things; we gag ourselves.

One of the most striking things about the Rochdale debate is its competitive scaremongering. It’s hard to know which side is worse: those who spread panic about the existence of sinister “networks” and “rings” of sex criminals and paedophiles across Britain, as if gangs like this exist everywhere, in every corner and community in the UK; or the coppers and commentators who stoke up fear about BNP thugs and ignorant white people who will apparently be provoked into violence if they so much as glimpse a headline containing the words “Asian sex gang”. One side wants us to view the existence of sex gangs like the one in Rochdale as commonplace in our allegedly misogynistic era; the other tries to convince us that ordinary people are a racist pogrom-in-the-making who must not be told that some Asians did some bad things.

Even the news reporting of the nine men’s crimes has been shot through with a scaremongering vibe. Using words like “ring” to describe the men’s gang and “trafficking” to describe their exploitation of young white women gives an impression of a super-evil, well-organised network of abusers. Such terminology, borrowed from the lexicon of feminist fearmongers, elevates the men’s depraved opportunism into a coherent, cult-like activity. We often see this today – small groups of no-marks with weird sexual habits being described as a “ring” or even an “international network”. This nurtures the nonsense notion that sects of paedophiles are widespread. Indeed, as the Deputy Children’s Commissioner Sue Berelowitz rather madly told the Today programme this morning, these networks exist “across every single ethnic and religious group, so there are victims and perpetrators across all ethnic and religious groups”. In short, “rings” of perverts are everywhere.

Part of the motivation behind this crazy claim is to try to attenuate the allegedly racist instincts of the white mob. They are second only to “paedo networks” in the list of people most feared by the Great and the Good. The reason Berelowitz and others insist, without evidence, that there are “networks of abusers” in “every single ethnic group” is because they are terrified of what the masses might do if they get the impression that something like the Rochdale sex crimes are an exclusively “Asian thing”. As one hack says, “Professional racists are keen to get their crowbars into cases such as this”, and so maybe the authorities should eschew words like “Asian” or “culture” when discussing this instance of grooming. It speaks volumes about the elite’s fear of white working-class communities that they feel more comfortable promoting the BS idea that all communities harbour networks of weirdos than they do grappling with what might be distinctive about the Rochadale gang.

The truth is that there is something specific going on here, something which is more prevalent among Asian communities, particularly Muslim ones, than among other communities. For a variety of reasons – mainly because the attitudes and behaviour of white working-class women are so profoundly at odds with the outlook of conservative Muslim communities – there is a tendency among many Muslims to look upon such women as inferior, as “sluts”. What’s more, in our era of multiculturalism, ethnic minorities are implicitly encouraged to distance themselves from their “host community” and even to view the host community’s culture as inferior to their own, as more shallow, hedonistic and consumer-orientated than their own authentic cultural lives. Mash these things together and it isn’t really surprising that there are some cut-off, conservative ethnic groups which now view young, white, possibly “fallen” women as unworthy and acquire a superiority complex over white “slags”. In Rochdale, certain individuals took that sense of cultural superiority in a terribly abusive direction.

When I contrast this with the Christians ideals of chastity, chivalry, romantic love and lifelong marriage, it’s like night and day.

Commentary

Correcting four myths about the Crusades

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Here is an interesting article from First Principles Journal.

Intro:

The verdict seems unanimous. From presidential speeches to role-playing games, the crusades are depicted as a deplorably violent episode in which thuggish Westerners trundled off, unprovoked, to murder and pillage peace-loving, sophisticated Muslims, laying down patterns of outrageous oppression that would be repeated throughout subsequent history. In many corners of the Western world today, this view is too commonplace and apparently obvious even to be challenged.

But unanimity is not a guarantee of accuracy. What everyone “knows” about the crusades may not, in fact, be true. From the many popular notions about the crusades, let us pick four and see if they bear close examination.

The four myths:

  • Myth #1: The crusades represented an unprovoked attack by Western Christians on the Muslim world.
  • Myth #2: Western Christians went on crusade because their greed led them to plunder Muslims in order to get rich.
  • Myth #3: Crusaders were a cynical lot who did not really believe their own religious propaganda; rather, they had ulterior, materialistic motives.
  • Myth #4: The crusades taught Muslims to hate and attack Christians.

Here’s the most obvious thing you should know. The Crusades were defensive actions:

In a.d. 632, Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Asia Minor, North Africa, Spain, France, Italy, and the islands of Sicily, Sardinia, and Corsica were all Christian territories. Inside the boundaries of the Roman Empire, which was still fully functional in the eastern Mediterranean, orthodox Christianity was the official, and overwhelmingly majority, religion. Outside those boundaries were other large Christian communities—not necessarily orthodox and Catholic, but still Christian. Most of the Christian population of Persia, for example, was Nestorian. Certainly there were many Christian communities in Arabia.

By a.d. 732, a century later, Christians had lost Egypt, Palestine, Syria, North Africa, Spain, most of Asia Minor, and southern France. Italy and her associated islands were under threat, and the islands would come under Muslim rule in the next century. The Christian communities of Arabia were entirely destroyed in or shortly after 633, when Jews and Christians alike were expelled from the peninsula.6 Those in Persia were under severe pressure. Two-thirds of the formerly Roman Christian world was now ruled by Muslims.

What had happened? Most people actually know the answer, if pressed—though for some reason they do not usually connect the answer with the crusades. The answer is the rise of Islam. Every one of the listed regions was taken, within the space of a hundred years, from Christian control by violence, in the course of military campaigns deliberately designed to expand Muslim territory at the expense of Islam’s neighbors. Nor did this conclude Islam’s program of conquest. The attacks continued, punctuated from time to time by Christian attempts to push back. Charlemagne blocked the Muslim advance in far western Europe in about a.d. 800, but Islamic forces simply shifted their focus and began to island-hop across from North Africa toward Italy and the French coast, attacking the Italian mainland by 837. A confused struggle for control of southern and central Italy continued for the rest of the ninth century and into the tenth. In the hundred years between 850 and 950, Benedictine monks were driven out of ancient monasteries, the Papal States were overrun, and Muslim pirate bases were established along the coast of northern Italy and southern France, from which attacks on the deep inland were launched. Desperate to protect victimized Christians, popes became involved in the tenth and early eleventh centuries in directing the defense of the territory around them.

This is always good to know when you are answering Muslims.