Everything That Ails Us

Truth to tell, there is no need for any of it to be happening:

“The crisis had no effect on our lives,” Jonas Frojelin, 37, a Swedish firefighter, said, referring to the global financial crisis that began in 2007. He lives with his wife, Malin, a nurse, in a seaside town a half-hour drive from Gothenburg, Sweden’s second-largest city.

They each have five weeks of vacation and comprehensive health benefits. They benefited from almost three years of paid leave, between them, after their children, now 3 and 6 years old, were born. Today, the children attend a subsidized child-care center that costs about 3 percent of the Frojelins’ income.

Even with a large welfare state in Sweden, per capita G.D.P. there has grown more quickly than in the United States over almost any extended recent period---a decade, 20 years, 30 years.

The point being that there is a policy fix for virtually everything under the sun. However, policy fixes often involve trade-offs, like (in this case) policy fixes that benefit firefighters and policy fixes that benefit bankers and billionaires. There's no reason why we can't have all the nice things the Swedes have, but we will need to start electing political leaders who don't hold their constituents in contempt.

---Baron V