Swedish lessons

Johan Norberg

Johan Norberg, a Swedish television journalist and policy analyst (imagine an intellectual Ryan Seacrest), has produced a documentary, Sweden: Lessons for America?, with the American non-profit Milton Friedman inspired group Free to Choose media.

Paradoxically, given Sweden's mythic status as an idyllic social democracy in the minds of many Americans, Norberg says the lessons learned are that the United States - if it wants to be a country with a highly literate, long-lived, healthy, wealthy population - should embrace the free market and become more libertarian.

Sweden has in the past two decades privatized the provision of most social services in its generous welfare state, for example shifting its entire education system to vouchers, which can be used at public or private schools, with parents able to send their children to any school, even in cities other than where they live.  Half of all schools are now private.

Anders Chydenius

Norberg also investigates how Sweden became wealthy before it created its welfare state in the 1950s:  it had more than a century of laissez faire liberalism, during which time it leapt from being one of the poorest countries with a population with relatively short lifespans to being the 4th wealthiest and one of the healthiest.  He unearths a heretofore little known (outside of Sweden) public intellectual, the pastor and journalist Anders Chydenius, who lived in the Swedish empire (in an area that is now Finland), and articulated ideas about competition, competitive advantage, and the gains of trade that were later made famous by Adam Smith.  Chydenius came up with these ideas first, but only promoted free markets (including granting private property to peasants) in the Swedish language, so that the English speaking world had to re-discover them later on its own.  To this day, though it has a variety of labor market regulations, Sweden has no minimum wage laws.

The documentary is timed, paced, and formatted perfectly for television.  School Inc., an earlier project by the Free to Choose group, on the school choice movement, caused gnashing of teeth by "progressives" and opponents of school choice who believe politically incorrect fare should be banned from PBS and other government funded media.

"Sweden: Lessons for America?" caused its own controversy this week as the opening entry into the libertarian film competition, the 8th Anthem Film Festival, part of the 17th FreedomFest conference held annually in Las Vegas, a kind of Burning Man for gold bugs who want to keep their clothes on and stay indoors.  In a Q&A panel afterwords, the Wall Street Journal's John Fund observed that the film avoided Sweden's response to mass immigration and what lesson America should be learning from that.  One audience member pointed out that there are now Swedish neighborhoods unsafe for a Jewish person to walk through, which another panelist hotly disputed.  (One of 22 films screened, "Sweden" did not win any of the prizes awarded.)

Both the Anthem Film Festival and FreedomFest, organized by hard money advocate and investment advice author Mark Skousen ran through Saturday night, with 2,000, older, well-healed, libertarian-leaning attendees.  C-Span's Peter Slen (as well as the internet channel ReasonTV) interviewed speakers at FreedomFest, who included Patrick Byrne, founder of Overstock.com, Steve Forbes, and keynote speaker George F. Will, Whole Foods founder John Mackey, former Governor Gary Johnson, and former Governor William Weld.  Fox News contributor John Stossel was replaced at the last minute, due to an accident resulting in a broken jaw, with a debate on the pros and cons of President Donald Trump, a repeat of a popular and hotly disputed panel held here in 2016.