their kettle was?
SWEDEN (FEBRUARY 1996) The Scandinavian countries have a system of generous social benefits in which the government takes money away from the rich to provide social benefits so generous that everyone becomes rich and gets their money taken away by the government to provide generous social benefits. This is seriously impossible, and probably only people as impossibly serious as the Scandinavians could make it work. Twenty-five years ago I predicted that they couldn’t keep it working. They went ahead and did. Maybe it’s something to do with the climate. Maybe it’s something to do with social customs. Maybe it’s something to do with how silly, banal, stupid, and boring ABBA is, and then you go to a stage performance of Mamma Mia! and find yourself dancing in the aisles. The “Scandinavian System” leaves everyone who adheres to libertarian economic principles feeling like the backwoods hick at the traveling circus who, seeing a giraffe for the first time, firmly declares, “There ain’t no such animal.” CUBA (MARCH 1996) If you go to Cuba ignore the fun. Yes, the rum is cheap, the cigars are good, the men are charming, the women are pretty, and the “Guantanamera” sing-alongs are very much the kind of thing you’ll like if you like that kind of thing. But it’s solipsistic fun—only existing or real to you in your own head. The Cubans are having no fun at all. Freedom House gives Cuba a miserable Freedom Score of 13—far worse than Afghanistan’s 27 and hardly better than the Gaza Strip’s 11. The conservative Heritage Foundation’s less human-rights-righteous and more business-like “Index of Economic Freedom” rates Cuba’s economy as “Repressed” and grades it at 28.1 out of 100. This puts Cuba, as a great place to start a new business, in between South Sudan and Venezuela. Cuba was in particularly bad economic shape when I went there. It had recently lost its subsidies from the defunct U.S.S.R. and had yet to fully exploit the solipsism of tourists taking sun-and-fun mind trips, never mind what was happening to actual Cubans. Estimates of Cuba’s mid-1990s per capita GDP, adjusted for inflation, ranged from $2,058 to $3,652. Current estimates range from $3,783 to $6,895. So it’s
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