back, plus interest. This is obviously stupid and exactly what we’ve been doing for decades in the United States. Deficits are less immediately painful than high inflation or huge taxes, although eventually they lead to one or the other, or both. In the meantime, we’re not getting anywhere. If all our investment money is tied up in loans to the government, that money is going to be spent on government things, such as financing the Inner City Wheatfare Program. Our investment money can’t be spent on research and development to create a genetically engineered wheat-eating squid to turn that worthless wheat into valuable calamari. 4. You Can’t Have Everything. If you use your resources to obtain a thing, you can’t use those same resources to obtain something else. That’s called fraud (or having a credit card). In economics its called “opportunity cost.” When you employ your money, brains, and time in one way, it costs you the opportunity to employ them in another. Opportunity costs fool people because they’re unseen. When we observe money being spent, we’re impressed. We gasp with awe at the huge new Federal Wheat Council headquarters in Washington, D.C. We don’t admire the vast schools of squid feeding in our nation's wheat fields—because they aren’t there. The main cost of government expenditure is not taxes, inflation, or interest on the national debt. The main cost is opportunity. Sweden is a case in point. The Swedes like what their government does. They look around Sweden and see handsome government buildings, nice government programs, and generous government benefits. What they look around and don’t see is what Sweden might have been if all that money had been invested in businesses and industries. From 1968 to 1969, before Sweden got carried away with its socialism, the country’s per-capita gross domestic product grew by 5.7 percent. What if the Swedes had kept that up, or for the sake of mathematical simplicity, improved it a bit? As organized and self-disciplined as the Swedes are, why not? What if the Swedish per-capita GDP had been growing by 6 percent annually for the past thirty years? Swedes, who are now about 27 percent poorer than Americans, would be more than three times as wealthy as we are. They’d have a per-capita GDP of more than $66,000. They’d be richer than the people of any country have ever been. And Sweden, with a population of only 9 million, would be one of the world’s great economic powers. Volvo would be winning the Daytona 500, Saab would have space stations, IKEA would furnish
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