Posted on 10/15/2015 8:21:17 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
It had to be Denmark, didn’t it?
If you are the sort of person who has better things to do — which is to say, a fully functioning adult who is not professionally obliged to follow these things — then you probably missed the exchange between Mrs. Clinton and Senator Sanders at last night’s debate, when she lectured him that the United States isn’t Denmark and he responded with a rousing defense of the Danish model.
Never mind, for the moment, that neither of these batty old geezers has the foggiest idea of what’s going on in Denmark, or in the other Nordic countries. Denmark, like Sweden before it, has been engaged in a long campaign of reforming its famously generous welfare state. The country’s current prime minister is the leader of a center-right party, which, strangely enough, goes by the name “Left,” Venstre. (You might even call it libertarian; its former longtime leader wrote a book bearing the positively Nozickian title “From Social State to Minimal State.” ) Denmark has been marching in the direction exactly opposite socialism for some time. Our friends at the Heritage Foundation rank its economy the eleventh most free in the world, one place ahead of the United States, reflecting Denmark’s strong property rights, relative freedom from corruption, low public debt, freedom of trade and investment, etc.
Don’t tell Senator Sanders, but Denmark’s corporate tax rate is a heck of a lot lower than our own.
RELATED: Bernie’s Strange Brew of Nationalism and Socialism
Senator Sanders is not very serious about imitating Denmark. Denmark has a large and expensive welfare state, which Senator Sanders envies. He doesn’t envy the other part of that handshake: Denmark pays for that large and expensive welfare state the only way that you can: with relatively high taxes on the middle class, whose members pay both high income taxes and a value-added tax. If Senator Sanders were an intellectually honest man, he’d acknowledge forthrightly that the only way to pay for generous benefits for the middle class is to tax the middle class, where most of the income earners are. Instead, he talks about taxing a handful of billionaires to pay for practically everything. Rhetorically, he’s already spent the entire holdings of the billionaire class many times over.
But Senator Sanders does not seem as if he thinks a great deal about these things. He worries about the size of the holdings of our largest banks (I’d bet a dollar that he could not explain the difference between an investment bank and a commercial bank) and frets that six big banks have assets equal to 65 percent of U.S. GDP. He does not consider that in Switzerland there are two banks whose combined assets are well more than twice Switzerland’s GDP, a reflection of the fact that the moneyed people and institutions of the world have a great deal of confidence in Swiss financial institutions, or that similar parties invest with American institutions for similar reasons. And never mind that Denmark’s largest bank has assets totaling 1.6 times Denmark’s GDP — a lot more than the 65 percent split among six banks in the United States that so troubles Sanders. Sanders’s line of thinking seems to go: “Bankers, money, evil, greedy, Make Them Pay!”
RELATED: The Debate Lesson: America Now Has an Openly Socialist Party
Democrats are positively delusional about this stuff, talking about Glass-Steagall as though not repealing it would have changed one thing about the way business was done at a pure-play investment bank such as Lehman Bros. or Bear Stearns. The policy is entirely unrelated to the problem, but neither the Democratic presidential candidates nor their voters understand the problem or the policy. They know only that Copenhagen is lovely, and people like Senator Sanders enjoy citing its “example” while shouting such nonsensical sentences as “Free health care is a right!”
#share#Denmark is on the mind of Francis Fukuyama, whose Political Order and Political Decay has now been issued in paperback, to the delight of cheapskate readers everywhere. Fukuyama, borrowing from a group of developmental economists, introduces his readers to the phrase “isomorphic mimicry,” by which he means the error that poor and developing countries make when they adopt the formal institutions of the developed world in the absence of the underlying values, habits, and culture that make those institutions effective. This is part of the problem he calls — surprise — “getting to Denmark.” Fukuyama:
The problem is that Denmark did not get to be Denmark in a matter of months or years. Contemporary Denmark — and all other developed countries — gradually evolved modern institutions over the course of centuries. If outside powers try to impose their own models of good institutions on a country, they are likely to produce what Lant Pritchett, Michael Woolcock, and Matt Andrews call “isomorphic mimicry”: a copying of the outward forms of Western institutions but without their substance.
(Here is the Pritchett-Woolcock-Andrews paper, which is well worth your time.)
That isomorphic mimicry is a great stumbling block. We’re right now in the end stages of failing, spectacularly, in a project to impose liberal democratic institutions on a Muslim world that isn’t much interested in them, but some of our more energetic conservative interventionists still seem to believe that one day an Arab or a Chinese is going to happen across a copy of the U.S. Constitution and build a Connecticut in the Orient. Cult is the first word in culture, which bears some consideration: The American revolutionaries emerged from a Puritan-Quaker culture shaped by the hardships of colonial life with the savage frontier in front of them and the Atlantic Ocean at their backs; the French revolutionaries emerged from a decadent Catholic culture shaped by court life and European rivalries. Both parties cried “Liberty!” but one produced the Bill of Rights and the other produced the Terror. The cultural distance between 21st-century Anglo-American liberals and tribal jihadis in the Hindu Kush is rather greater than was the distance between Thomas Jefferson and the Abbé Sieyès.
Aping the superficial attractive forms of alien polities is not an error limited to the poor and the backward. Our progressive friends argued that Obamacare is just like the Swiss health-care system, which is generally quite highly regarded, and it is, with one important difference: Switzerland is full of Swiss people and the United States is not. The Swiss health-care system turns out to be poorly suited for a country that isn’t Swiss. Any bets on how well the Danish welfare state is going to play in Mississippi and New Jersey?
Progressives who imagine that Americans are one election away from getting to Denmark do not understand Denmark, or America, or much of anything.
— Kevin D. Williamson is roving correspondent at National Review.
How DARE you post a lengthy, well-written and well-reasoned think piece like this?
We are 21st century Americans and we demand slogans and short sound bites.
Bernie, you said: “You don’t necessarily need a choice of 23 underarm spray deodorants or of 18 different pairs of sneakers when children are hungry in this country.”
So let me get this straight, Bernie . . . you're going to set up an agency or a czar to determine how many kinds of deodorant, and how much of it, can be permitted by law?
Will you do the same with toilet paper? I mean look how many brands of toilet paper there are. Shall we just set up a monopoly of one company, or better yet, a government monopoly, to produce exactly the right amount of toilet paper, or otherwise limit the amount of toilet paper that gets produced?
Are you going to hire Michael Gruber to be the guy who figures out the correct amount of toilet paper that people should be allowed to use? He's smart. He teaches at MIT. So why shouldn't we put him in charge of figuring out exactly how much of everything should or shouldn't be produced for the American people?
Have you been to socialist Venezuela lately, Bernie? They seem to have solved the problem of too many toilet paper brands. Because right now there is no toilet paper to be had at all in socialist Venezuela."
So tell me Bernie, what exactly will you do to feed starving children by reducing the amount of toilet paper we have in this country? And by the way, when you close all the toilet paper companies, how will the people who used to work at them feed their own starving children?
Bernie? . . . .
Oh, wait a minute. KDW did give us a memorable (and repeatable) phrase after all, describing Clinton and Sanders as “batty old geezers” -— too, too perfect!
Bernie boy is a genuine crackpot.
Karl Marx HATED the middle class.
He HATED them.
The Communist Manifesto is a how too manual for getting rid of the middle class.
Yet here’s Bernie: he wants to do this Marxist idea (to help the middle class) and that Marxist idea (to help the middle class).
And the middle class Marxists just can’t wait to vote for Bernie. :)
The standard Commie term for the middle class is "Bourgeoisie."
Ping.
In Russia they were called kulaks and Stalin’s program was “liquidation of the kulaks as a class.”
I had a colleague who lived in Denmark for a time.
He said it was horrifyingly expensive.
great article.
The media and some liberals never tell the entire story.
For example, they say that in Europe people can go to University for free. Well first off, it’s not free, someone has to pay for it. But the bigger omission is that not everyone gets into University. There are very rigorous entrance requirements to get in, exams et and once in you have to keep very high academic standards. That would mean if we instituted such a thing here, a much smaller percentage of people would go to University than do now, but they would be people more likely to succeed there and the degree would actually mean something.
I would go for that type of system ... IF it was constructed the way it is in the many European countries they are always braying about. But you just know that is not what they are talking about. They are talking about a free-for-all with no standards, no accountability etc.
How on earth was it possible that Anderson Cooper happened to have the population of Denmark, right of the top of his head?
I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore, Toto.
So are the people putting his sticker on their cars.
I stopped reading at 140 characters.
“How on earth was it possible that Anderson Cooper happened to have the population of Denmark, right of the top of his head?”
Because he knew that Bernie would cite Denmark as an example when asked about his peculiar brand of socialism. Progressives are always braying about the success of Scandinavian socialism without regard to the facts cited in this article.
The NCAA has ruined the universities.
BFL. Need to read that “compatibility traps” paper. Might have to forward it out to some liberals to watch their heads explode.
This is one of the main problem with Ted Cruz's candidacy. What he says will often not fit on a bumper sticker. If it won't fit on a bumper sticker, it goes nowhere.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.