82% of Democrats and 16% of Republicans support single-payer healthcare when told that Obama supports it. When instead told that Trump supports it, Dem support drop to 46% and Rep support increase to 44%.
#FactsfromOpen
(15 of 100)
How it started:
"Covid-19 is the end of globalism and neoliberalism"
How it's going:
Vaccine created at record speed by big pharma that declined government subsidies, based on tech developed by a German biotech company, founded and led by Turkish immigrant.
What happened to the “race to the bottom”, the most popular anti-globalization theory around 2000? Stiglitz et al warned we’d see more poverty, child labor and pollution as countries lowered standards to attract global capital. Well, every prediction turned out to be false. 🧵
Oxfam’s new report rails against a “40-year period of neoliberalism, during which economic policy choices have been purchased by rich, powerful and corrupt elites”.
If true, this 40-year conspiracy to steal from the poor must be the biggest fiasco in the history of conspiracies.
How did Sweden fare during the pandemic? Back then, the world was shocked by our openness. New York Times called us a “cautionary tale”, Trump said “Sweden is suffering very greatly”. But we never heard how it all turned out.
Now I’ve looked: Sweden did better than others. 🧵
People, please. Before you share the first chart to prove that Sweden is a disaster, or the second, to prove that Sweden is a success, bear in mind that the world knows that the other chart exists, and makes you look silly.
But it's difficult to compare death rates in Sweden and Russia, because Sweden doesn't hide cases. For example, when a doctor is pushed out of a window to his death, it is recorded as a murder in Sweden.
Has anything like this been recorded in peacetime anywhere before?
"per capita GDP in Venezuela has dropped a staggering 87% over the past decade, from $12,200 a year in 2011 to $1,540 now. For the first time, the average Venezuelan is poorer than the average Haitian." (FT)
In 2007 just 27% of US Muslims said that homosexuality should be accepted by society. 10 years later, this had increased to 52%. US Muslims are now more tolerant than the average American was in 2006.
#FactsfromOpen
(34 of 100)
It’s that time of year again: Oxfam is making up data. Warning about ”widening and extreme inequality”, “Since 2020, the richest 5 men in the world have doubled their fortunes. During the same period, almost 5 billion people globally have become poorer.” The truth is different:
”Nobody has the right to not be offended. That right doesn't exist in any declaration I have ever read. If you are offended it is your problem”
– Salman Rushdie
The thing is, capital doesn’t search for the poorest places (they are usually poor because it’s difficult to do business there). More importantly, when trade and capital actually head for poor countries, they raise productivity and so also raise wages and standards.
Pope Francis on "neoliberalism": this "repetitive school of thought always offers the same recipes... resorting to magic theories". I hereby challenge the Pope to a debate about which school of thought is a) most repetitive, b) resorts more to magic theories, and c) delivers.
Here is your annual reminder to be patient and wait for more data:
The Guardian in May 2020: "Eastern Europe suffered less from coronavirus [than countries like Sweden, because of] the early lockdown implemented by almost all countries in the region"
A reminder: The right to speak freely is a negative right. No one may silence you or jail you for it. It’s not a claim on others, that they publish you, or take you seriously. It’s like property rights – they can’t take away your property, but they don’t have to give you theirs.
Sweden’s excess death rate during the three pandemic years, 2020–2022, compared to the previous three years, was 4.4%. Remarkably, it is the lowest excess mortality rate of all European countries, including our Scandinavian neighbors.
Welcome back, Poland, we have been waiting for you to take your rightful place as a leading democratic European power. (If exit polls are correct, and the opposition ousts the nationalist-statist PiS.)
The last speaker at our
@CatoInstitute
Argentina conference was president
@JMilei
. Western media wants to present him as a crazy Trump populist, and he sure keeps some strange company. But his ideas are entirely different, and his speech was a thoughtful, slightly technical
Incredible. Bolivarian socialism has turned Venezuela into the most unequal country in the world, according to research at Andrés Bello Catholic University.
Swedes turn out to have adapted their behaviors to the pandemic, but voluntarily.
It suggests that it was not Sweden, but the lockdown countries that engaged in a reckless experiment, depriving millions of liberties without a discernible benefit to public health.
Don't forget who they are and what they said. The nationalist populists are not western patriots, they are Putin's fellow travellers and betrayers of western ideals of liberal democracy and the international order.
Why on earth did I write a Capitalist Manifesto? Because more people believe in ghosts than in capitalism. Today's fashionable narrative is that the rich got richer and the poor poorer, inequality surged, and during the pandemic, free trade failed us. But that’s all wrong. 🧵
Sweden had no orders to stay at home and no mask mandates. Schools, offices, factories, restaurants, libraries, shopping centers, gyms and hairdressers stayed open. Our Social Democratic Prime Minister said that individual responsibility was preferable to government control.
Fox News claims that Denmark is a socialist country. Here is the economic freedom ranking from conservative Heritage Foundation and Wall Street Journal.
Do you remember
@BrankoMilan
's Elephant Chart, revealing unequal rewards and the rise of the 1%? Since then, the elephant has lost its trunk. Since 2008, incomes of the poorest increased by 7% a year, the middle by 4-6% and the richest by less than 2%
In conclusion, the race to the bottom is a myth. If anything, globalization and free trade have set off a race to the top. I’ve just published this paper about it in Cato’s Defending Globalization-series.
#CatoGlobalization
Did these gains come at the expense of health? Surprisingly, no. Sweden was an outlier in terms of policy, but not in terms of Covid-19 mortality, and only suffered 7% of the deaths predicted by the kind of models that scared other countries into lockdowns.
1) Senior VP Kathrin Jansen: Pfizer was “never part of the Warp Speed. We have never taken any money from the U.S. government”, because "I wanted to liberate our scientists from any bureaucracy. When you get money from someone, that always comes with strings" (CEO Albert Bourla)
I have just published a Cato Policy Analysis paper about these little-known findings, “Sweden during the Pandemic: Pariah or Paragon?”
You can read it here:
Neither is there an environmental race to the bottom. As countries get richer, they invest more in green tech and environmental performance. Remarkably, environmental protection is now better in big middle-income countries than it was in Sweden, the UK and US in 1995.
Protests against Israel's participation in Eurovision Song Contest in Malmö Sweden, today. Here we learn how they can support Hamas and intifada: they have a soft spot for totalitarian mass murderers in general. Four of the organising groups even have "communist" in their name.
In 1995, Katalin Karikó was demoted from a senior position at Pennsylvania University and had to accept a substantial pay cut, because few believed in her mRNA technology. Today she got the Nobel Prize.
School kids also benefited. The U.S. Department of Education concludes that half of America’s students began 2023 a full year behind grade level in at least one subject. In sharp contrast, Swedish elementary schoolers suffered no learning loss during the pandemic.
As expected, the economy benefited. The world economy was 2.9% smaller late 2021 than it would be according to forecasts before the pandemic; the Eurozone 2.1% smaller, and the U.S. 1.2% smaller.
The Swedish economy was 0.4 percent BIGGER than forecast before the pandemic.
I would like a leader of the free world who condemns China’s despotism and labour camps, but welcomes its cheap solar panels and washing machines. Not the other way around.
These polls are remarkable. By attacking trade and immigration so viciously and incompetently, Trump has turned Americans into staunch pro-immigration free traders.
As both the Left and the Right reject global capitalism, there is a sudden demand for pro-market arguments, and the market instantly responds with ample supply.
UK 15 June:
US 19 Sept:
What happened to absolute poverty overall? It increased when Covid shut down the world economy, but declined when it re-opened, to the lowest level ever. Since 2000, down from 29% to 8.6%. Oxfam doesn’t mention this, because they seem to hate wealth more than they hate poverty.
Two months ago, Stockholm built a field hospital with 140 beds in case our health care system was overwhelmed. It will now be shut down. It never had to admit any patients.
There are different ways of adjusting for age and previous trends, and according to some methods, Denmark beats Sweden to first place, but all methods show that Sweden had one of the lowest rates.
America’s excess death rate was more than twice as high as Sweden’s.
Oxfam published a new report today, ahead of the Davos meeting, as usual blaming poverty and hunger on “neoliberalism”, inequality and billionaire wealth. Here is what’s wrong with it. 🧵
Global working conditions improved. WHO and ILO records a “substantial reduction in the total work‐related burden of disease” 2000-2016. The global rate of deaths related to work declined by 14%.
Great discussion w
@elonmusk
:
“The government’s role is to be the referee, allowing players to play the game. What happens over time is that the gov keeps growing and at a certain point you have more referees than players on the field. And that game is not good.”
@CatoInstitute
Tomorrow, 4 July, is an important day in British politics: The paperback edition of The Capitalist Manifesto will be on sale in the UK. Read it now and you have the chance of being pre-emptively depressed about all the mistakes of the next government.
Pfizer did not take part in the Trump Administration's Operation Warp Speed, and did not accept government subsidies. It succeeds because it was built for speed and conducts tests in many countries, not just in the US. (Excerpt from NYT Sept)