annoying public musicians (though perhaps it wasn’t the season). There are no woebegone panhandlers or newspaper-wrapped transients (it was certainly the season for that). The modern structures are maintained. The old structures are restored. The Swedes must levitate their garbage. I never saw a bin or can. When the crane fell over, it was cut apart with torches and whisked away by supper time. I asked Janerik Larsson—executive vice president and director of communications at a media conglomerate with the conglomeration of a name Industriforvaltnings AB Kinnevik—why Swedes still worked. If they don’t work, they get almost what they would get if they did work. And if they do work, their raises and bonuses are all taxed away. Give Americans a situation like that, and we’d be putting all our economic energy into playing extra cards at the bingo hall. But there was nothing visible in Sweden to indicate much national goldbricking. Mr. Larsson pointed to the window: “You see how it is outside? It’s always like that here.” Over the centuries the Swedish gene stock has been culled. The lazy ones froze. I asked Dr. Carl-Johan Westholm—the president of the Federation of Private Enterprises (in Sweden, even opposition to central planning is centrally planned) —why Sweden still worked. If Sweden is so poor, where is the poverty? Why aren’t there people at stoplights offering to clean my windshield? Or, more to the point, my shoes? “We don’t have income, but we still have wealth,” said Dr. Westholm. “You may live in a big house, and the neighbors think you’re wealthy. And they’re right in a sense. But they don’t see you going to the bank to take out a second mortgage.” He explained that more than 46 percent of the Swedish government budget is spent on transfer payments—giving cash to people. The budget shortfall is equal to about a third of that 46 percent. To give out three kronors, the government has to sponge one of them. “Sweden is borrowing its prosperity,” said Dr. Westholm. What happens to Sweden when nobody’s willing to lend it more money and the Swedes finally realize that they really can skip work for four months if the kid pukes? The people of Sweden—like Damocles—are set down to a sumptuous feast, and overhead, suspended by a hair is . . . not a sword, this is too prosaic a country . . . a gigantic wet blanket.
According to the Swedish Institute’s booklet On Sweden, “The overall aims of
Made with FlippingBook - professional solution for displaying marketing and sales documents online