STOCKHOLM – Can a nation come back from the dead? An article in Foreign Policy magazine 10 years ago suggested Sweden was committing national suicide with its open-door immigration policy.
Add to that sky-high taxes and a bloated welfare state. CBN News reported this from Sweden in 2004:
“Welcome to a veritable welfare wonderland, where alcoholics can retire on government pensions, where the average worker calls in sick one day a week, whether sick or not, where drug addicts get disability checks, and where the real unemployment rate is close to 25%.”
A Bloated Welfare State and Unbridled Immigration Were Eroding Quality of Life
The Left used to be so strong in Sweden that those who simply spoke out against immigration were branded “racist,” and some were even doxxed by the media and saw their careers ruined.
Sweden also boasted the world’s first feminist government, while wearing burqas on a state visit to Iran, and allowing a migrant rape epidemic to put Swedish women at risk. The government’s response? Hand out bracelets reading, “Do not molest me.”
Immigrant gang violence was surging, quality of life began to crumble, and a hypothetical UN study from 2010, which Swedes have roundly ridiculed, suggested Sweden could become a third-world nation.
Then the Swedes finally had enough and voted for reform.
Sweden Has Discovered Capitalism?
After years of reporting on Sweden’s problems, we went to Sweden to see if, as some in the U.S. media were reporting, Sweden is fixing many of its problems.
The Wall Street Journal reported recently that Sweden has suddenly “embraced capitalism” and “rugged individualism,” and Fox Business announced that Sweden has “privatized its economy.”
Still a Socialist Nation
However, when we shared this with Adam Danieli, the head of Timbro, Sweden’s free market think tank, he laughed, telling us, “Uh, no, that’s not true. We still have one of the highest tax rates in the world. We have a very large welfare state. We have a labor market that is more regulated than any other in Europe, I would say. We have a socialist medical system, very similar to the British one. We’ve had some major reforms, but it’s not a rugged, individualistic system. No.”
When we showed the Wall Street Journal article to Swedish-American economist Dr. Sven Larson, he wrote a rebuttal for The European Conservative.
Larson told us, “The message in my article in The European Conservative was that the situation in Sweden is very different from how the media presents it. Sweden is not a libertarian paradise. Last year, the last quarter of last year, I just checked the numbers, government spent 53% of the economy, and taxes took in over 48% of the economy.”
“Government takes half the economy, shuffles it around, and spends it in a way that they, not the free market, want to see it spent. Sweden is not a libertarian paradise,” Larson said.
Sweden’s center-right coalition government has tried to ‘tweak’ the welfare state to make it more sustainable, and has enacted limited privatization, boosting Sweden to one of the top-performing economies in Europe. And when it comes to immigration:
- the open-door immigration policy has been reversed;
- the government has increased deportations;
- they’ve offered financial incentives for refugees to go back to their home countries, and;
- they’ve made it harder to become a citizen.
Swedes Want Government to Go Back to ‘Bloated’
And although violent crime is down and the economy is up, polls show voters are poised to put the Social Democrats back into power in September, and they’re promising a big expansion of the welfare state.
“And it concerns me a great deal,” Larson said, “because if you look at all the taxes that the left wants to introduce, they want to take Sweden back, I would say 20, 25 years, and you will have a major crisis in Sweden.”
Why do Swedes want to go back? There’s a feeling that the government has cut back too much.
The ‘Angry Foreigner’ Says Swedes Believe ‘Lies’ About Their Country
One of the country’s toughest internal critics says Sweden never really changed; it just went into damage control.
Vedad Odobasic, known as the ‘Angry Foreigner’ on YouTube, made a splash when his video on Sweden’s immigrant rape epidemic received millions of views.
Odobasic came to Sweden from Bosnia when he was 5 and says he’s still treated as an outsider. He accuses Swedes of believing an image of Sweden that doesn’t exist.
He says it’s a national image, “That they are the ‘bestest,’ ‘goodest,’ kindest country. That they are individualist,” Odobasic said. “At the same time, we have at least one million people on anti-depressants, we have a gambling epidemic, we have a drug epidemic. Middle-class families are very fond of cocaine. They are funding these gangs. It’s all been openly discussed, but no one’s really connecting the dots. It’s the mechanism of denial. This is a country that’s convinced themselves that they can integrate people by never hanging out with them, and subsidizing their empathy to governments and letting the state deal with these problems, and the clichés don’t really match up with the reality.”
You’d think that most Swedes would be happy with a government that has reduced immigration, made the economy stronger and the streets safer, but they’re not, and the reason has to do with what kind of nation Swedes think Sweden should be, whether that works in reality or not.
