Why Is the Left so Sensitive about Cuba?

I touched a raw nerve with my post about Fidel Castro admitting that the Cuban model is a failure. Matthew Yglesias and Brad DeLong both attacked me. DeLong's post was nothing more than a link to the Yglesias post with a snarky comment about "why can't we have better think tanks?" Yglesias, to his credit, tried to explain his objections.

This leads Daniel Mitchell to post the following chart which he deems “a good illustration of the human cost of excessive government.”...this mostly illustrates the difficulty of having a rational conversation with Cato Institute employees about economic policy in the developed world. Cuba is poor, but it’s much richer than Somalia. Is Somalia’s poor performance an illustration of the human costs of inadequate taxation? Or maybe we can act like reasonable people and note that these illustrations of the cost of Communist dictatorship and anarchy have little bearing on the optimal location on the Korea-Sweden axis of mixed economies?

I'm actually not sure what argument Yglesias is making, but I think he assumed I was focusing only about fiscal policy when I commented about Cuba's failure being "a good illustration of the human cost of excessive government." At least I think this is what he means, because he then tries to use Somalia as an example of limited government, solely because the government there is so dysfunctional that it is unable to maintain a working tax system.

Regardless of what he's really trying to say, my post was about the consequences of excessive government, not just the consequences of excessive government spending. I'm not a fan of high taxes and wasteful spending, to be sure, but fiscal policy is only one of many policies that influence economic performance. Indeed, according to both Economic Freedom of the World and Index of Economic Freedom, taxes and spending are only 20 percent of a nation's grade. So nations such as Sweden and Denmark are ranked very high because the adverse impact of their fiscal policies is more than offset by their very laissez-faire policies in just about all other areas. Likewise, many nations in the developing world have modest fiscal burdens, but their overall scores are low because they get poor grades on variables such as monetary policy, regulation, trade, rule of law, and property rights.

So, yes, Cuba is an example of "the human cost of excessive government." And so is Somalia.

Sweden and Denmark, meanwhile, are both good and bad examples. Optimists can cite them as great examples of the benefits of laissez-faire markets. Pessimists can cite them as unfortunate examples of bloated public sectors.

P.S. Castro has since tried to recant, claiming he was misquoted. He's finding out, though, that it's not easy putting toothpaste back in the tube.

America Drops to Fourth Place in Global Competitiveness Ranking

After being in 1st place in 2007 and 2008, America dropped behind Switzerland in the World Economic Forum's Global Competitiveness Report in 2009. The 2010 ranking was just released, and the United States has tumbled two more spots to 4th place, behind Switzerland, Sweden, and Singapore. I'm not a complete fan of the World Economic Forum's methodology (the Economic Freedom of the World rankings are the best measure of sound economic policy), but it's almost surely a bad sign when a country moves down in the rankings. The timing of the fall will lead some to blame Barack Obama, and I certainly agree that his policies are making America less competitive, but Bush also deserves blame for increasing the burden of government and compromising America's economic vitality. Here's a blurb from the Associated Press.

The U.S. has slipped down the ranks of competitive economies, falling behind Sweden and Singapore due to huge deficits and pessimism about government, a global economic group said Thursday. Switzerland retained the top spot for the second year in the annual ranking by the Geneva-based World Economic Forum. It combines economic data and a survey of more than 13,500 business executives. Sweden moved up to second place while Singapore stayed at No. 3. The United States was in second place last year after falling from No. 1 in 2008.

Great Moments in Government-Run Healthcare

Somebody sent me this story from the Drudge Report and can't resist the temptation to share. What really astounds me is not that a Swedish man sewed up his own leg after waiting for a long time in a hospital. Heck, I wouldn't be surprised if things like that happened in all nations. The really disturbing part of the story is that the hospital then reported the man to the police. A classic case of "blaming the victim." The bureaucrats in Sweden's government-run healthcare system obviously were not pleased that he called attention to their failure.

A 32-year-old took the needle into his hands when he tired of the wait at Sundsvall hospital in northern Sweden and sewed up the cut in his leg himself. The man was later reported to the police for his impromptu handiwork. "It took such a long time," the man told the local Sundsvall Tidning daily. The man incurred the deep cut when he sliced his leg on the sharp edge of a kitchen stove while he was renovating at home. "I first went to the health clinic, but it was closed. So I rang the medical help line and they told me that it shouldn't be closed, so I went to emergency and sat there," the man named only as Jonas told the newspaper. After an hour-long wait in a treatment room, he lost patience and proceeded to sew up his own wound. "They had set out a needle and thread and so I decided to take the matter into my hands," he said. But hospital staff were not as impressed by his initiative and have reported the man on suspicion of arbitrary conduct for having used hospital equipment without authorization.

International Evidence Shows Spending Restraint Is Best Way to Address Red Ink

Tyler Cowen's recent New York Times column explains how nations as diverse as Ireland, Sweden, and Canada have successfully solved fiscal problems by limiting the growth of government spending:

America's long-run fiscal outlook is bleak, mostly because of an aging population and rising health care costs. To close the gap between expenditures and revenue, ...we’ll need to focus especially on reducing spending, largely because that taxes on the wealthy can be raised only so high. ...Higher income tax rates would discourage hard work and encourage tax avoidance, thereby defeating the purpose of the tax increases. ...Higher levels of government spending and taxation would also soak up resources that might otherwise foster innovation and new businesses. And sentiment would most likely turn ever stronger against those immigrants who consume public services and make the deficit higher in the short run. ...The macroeconomic evidence also suggests the wisdom of emphasizing spending cuts. In a recent paper, Alberto Alesina and Silvia Ardagna, economics professors at Harvard, found that in developed countries, spending cuts were the key to successful fiscal adjustments — and were generally better for the economy than tax increases. ...The received wisdom in the United States is that deep spending cuts are politically impossible. But a number of economically advanced countries, including Sweden, Finland, Canada and, most recently, Ireland, have cut their government budgets when needed. Most relevant, perhaps, is Canada, which cut federal government spending by about 20 percent from 1992 to 1997.

Why Does Obama Want to Make America More Like Sweden When Swedish Politicians Are Trying to Move in the Opposite Direction?

Powerful Evidence for School Choice

The Mayor of Stockholm gave some brief remarks at the closing dinner of the Mont Pelerin Society meeting and mentioned that the number of students in private schools had skyrocketed after the implementation of Sweden's school choice program. Intrigued, I emailed the folks at one of the nation's research organizations to ask for some details.

The figures are impressive. The number of students attending private high schools has jumped from 1.7 percent in 1992 to 19.5 percent in 2008. Not surprisingly, the quality of education is high. Indeed, researchers have looked at the data and concluded that, "Our findings support the hypothesis that school results in public schools improve due to competition."

Examining Swedish Models

No, not these kind. Instead, I'm in Stockholm for a meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society, and this gathering of classical liberals (i.e., the Adam Smith types that believe in freedom, not the modern liberals that favor collectivism) has featured some discussion of the Scandinavian social welfare state - often referred to as the Swedish Model.

What is particularly interesting is that Sweden is not the left-wing paradise that some imagine. Yes, government is far too big, consuming about 50 percent of economic output. But Sweden also has an extensive system of school choice. Equally remarkable, Sweden has a system of personal retirement accounts. Indeed, if one removed fiscal policy variables from the ratings, Sweden would be more free market than the United States in the Economic Freedom of the World rankings.

But even in the area of fiscal policy, Sweden is making progress. In recent years, policy makers have abolished both the death tax and the wealth tax. And the corporate tax rate has been reduced significantly below the U.S. level.

Sweden often is cited as an example of a nation that proves a big welfare state is not an obstacle to being a rich society. But as I wrote in my study comparing the United States and the Nordic nations:

Many prosperous nations in Western Europe have large welfare states. This leads unsophisticated observers to sometimes assume that high tax rates and high levels of government spending do not hinder growth. Indeed, they sometimes even conclude that bigger government somehow facilitates growth. ...This analysis puts the cart before the horse. It is possible for a nation to become rich and then adopt a welfare state. ...A poor nation that adopts the welfare state, however, is unlikely to ever become rich. Before the 1960s, Nordic nations had modest levels of taxation and spending. They also enjoyed—and still enjoy—laissez-faire policies and open markets in other areas. These are the policies that enabled Nordic nations to prosper for much of the 20th century. Once their countries became rich, politicians in Nordic nations focused on how to redistribute the wealth that was generated by private-sector activity. This sequence is important. Nordic nations became rich, and then government expanded. This expansion of government has slowed growth, but slow growth for a rich nation is much less of a burden than slow growth in a poor nation.