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미 전문가들 “문 대통령의 남북 철도·도로 발언 미국 불편하게 만들 것”
미 정보당국에서 오랫동안 북한과 중국 경제를 분석한 윌리엄 브라운 조지타운대 객원교수 역시 문 대통령의 발언은 트럼프 행정부를 화나게 했을 것이라고 말했습니다.
김정은 정권이 비핵화에 주목할 만한 진전을 보인 것도 아니고 내부적으로 사회주의 체제나 인권을 개선한 것도 아닌데 문 대통령이 이런 말을 하는 것은 미 관리들에게 “지금 무슨 얘기를 하느냐”고 반문하게 할 것이란 겁니다.
브라운 교수는 이어 철도·도로 연결은 유엔 제재와 병행할 수 없다며, 추후 제재 해제를 전제로 말했다 하더라도 너무 시기상조로 보인다고 말했습니다.
출처: 미국의소리
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1970년대보다 적게 먹지만, 가공 식품을 먹어서 사람들의 비만이 늘었다는 몸비옷의 이상한 주장.
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이미 106년 전에 나온 온난화 주장. 1년에 20억 톤의 석탄을 연소시킴으로써 70억 톤의 이상화탄소를 만들고, 이것이 담요처럼 작용해 지구를 따뜻하게 해서, 기온을 올린다는 추측.
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공포 선동가들이 새로 만든 단어 --- 온실 지구
환경론자들의 주장은 과학이 아니라, 지구적 통제를 위한 환경 파시스트들의 선언문이다.
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새로운 연구에 따르면, 신경계의 건강은, 두뇌에서 근육으로 보내는 신호뿐만 아니라, 인체의 대퇴 근육에서 두뇌로 보내는 신호에도 의존한다고 한다.
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시간이 갈수록 서구 의학의 헛점이 드러나고 있다. 한의학으로 각종 정신병을 치료하고 있다.
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자유주의란 용어의 변질
자유주의는 특수 집단이 아닌, 전체의 복지 증진을 목표로 한 최초의 정치 운동이었다. 반자유주의자들의 정책은 자본 소비의 정책이다. 그들은 미래를 희생하면서 현재를 즐기려 한다.
자유주의liberalism가 좌파적 사상을 지칭하는 단어가 되면서, 진정한 자유주의자들은 자유주의를 버리고, “classical liberalism을 썼다.
Liberalism and "Classical Liberalism" — An Unfortunate Evolution
David Gordon
Nineteenth-century European liberalism stemmed from two main sources. First, John Locke developed traditional natural law theory in a new direction. In his Second Treatise on Government, he argued that everyone has a property in his own person; this is exactly the self-ownership principle of Murray Rothbard’s libertarianism. On this basis, individuals could acquire property through appropriation.
Given self-ownership and property rights, there is very little scope left in Locke’s system of thought for the state. Though the interpretation of Locke has aroused fierce controversy, A. John Simmons has in On the Edge of Anarchy made a strong argument that a Lockean political order would be close to anarchy.
Of course, the Lockean regime was never fully implemented, but arguments for individual rights of the sort he advanced had great influence on nineteenth-century liberalism. The great French economist Frédéric Bastiat argued in The Law that “Each of us has a natural right — from God — to defend his person, his liberty, and his property.” The state can acquire no new rights that individuals do not possess.
Besides arguments based on natural rights, another source led to nineteenth-century liberalism. The new science of economics conclusively demonstrated that social cooperation through the free market enabled people to achieve peace and prosperity. As Ludwig von Mises explained matters in his great 1927 classic Liberalism: “Liberalism has always had in view the good of the whole, not that of any special group. It was this that the English utilitarians meant to express — although, it is true, not very aptly — in their famous formula, ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number.’ Historically, liberalism was the first political movement that aimed at promoting the welfare of all, not that of special groups. Liberalism is distinguished from socialism, which likewise professes to strive for the good of all, not by the goal at which it aims, but by the means that it chooses to attain that goal. ... Antiliberal policy is a policy of capital consumption. It recommends that the present be more abundantly provided for at the expense of the future.”
Unfortunately, stress on this second strand of thought led to a problem in English classical liberalism. The classical economists like Smith and Ricardo had no general argument that ruled out altogether government intervention in the economy. Rather, they examined matters on a case-by-case basis, usually concluding that a free market policy was best. But this was not always true; Adam Smith, for example, accepted some restrictions on free trade and supported government provision of public goods. John Stuart Mill’s Principles of Political Economy , the culminating work of the British classical economists, weakened support for a free economy still further.
Even in its weakened state, though, classical political economy still rested on an individualistic basis. A new sort of liberalism challenged individualism head on. The Oxford political philosopher Thomas Hill Green denied that individuals have rights apart from their participation in a collective entity, the State. True enough, individuals did have a right to self-realization; but Green meant by this not real, flesh-and-blood individuals as they actually exist, but the “real” self, governed by correct principles of rationality. In this view, you are not “really” choosing if you act against what Green took to be the dictates of reason. As he said, “[W]e shall see that freedom of contract, freedom in all the forms of doing what one will with one’s own, is valuable only as a means to an end. That end is what I call freedom in the positive sense: in other words, the liberation of the powers of all men equally for contributions to a common good. No one has a right to do what he will with his own in such a way to contravene this end.”
Another philosopher who championed the “new liberalism”, Leonard Hobhouse, did not go as far as Green. He challenged what he termed the “metaphysical theory of the state” found in Green’s idealist successor Bernard Bosanquet, but he did not favor a return to the older tradition of individualism. He rejected the individualist conception of property rights, holding instead that property exists to promote a collective purpose. Social legislation, of a sort the older liberalism would have rejected, was required.
The new liberalism transformed liberalism into its opposite, and “classical liberalism” came into use as a term to designate the position of those, such as Herbert Spencer and his disciple Auberon Herbert, who rejected the welfare state.
Concerning the new liberalism, Mises mordantly observed in Liberalism, “Nor can the programs and actions of those parties that today call themselves liberal provide us with any enlightenment concerning the nature of true liberalism. It has already been mentioned that even in England what is understood as liberalism today bears a much greater resemblance to Toryism and socialism than to the old program of the freetraders. If there are liberals who find it compatible with their liberalism to endorse the nationalization of railroads, of mines, and of other enterprises, and even to support protective tariffs, one can easily see that nowadays nothing is left of liberalism but the name.”
David Gordon is Senior Fellow at the Mises Institute, and editor of The Mises Review.
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스칸디나비아는 예외적이지 않다.
Why Scandinavia Isn't Exceptional
Per Bylund
[From the Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics.]
The Scandinavian countries, and primary among them Sweden, are commonly referred to as anomalies or inspirations, depending on one’s political point of view. The reason is that the countries do not appear to fit the general pattern: they are enormously successful whereas they “shouldn’t” be. Indeed, Scandinavians enjoy very high living standards despite having very large, progressive welfare states for which they pay the world’s highest taxes.
As a result, a large and growing literature, both propagandist and scholarly, has emerged that tries to identify the reasons for this Scandinavian exceptionalism—especially as pertains to their welfare states. I have myself contributed to this literature1 and have previously reviewed others’ contributions to it in this journal.2 But what has been missing is a summary analysis that is accessible to non-scholars. It was therefore a delight to read Nima Sanandaji’s Scandinavian Unexceptionalism: Culture, Markets, and the Failure of Third-Way Socialism, published by British Institute for Economic Affairs.
Dr. Sanandaji is a political-economy analyst and writer, well known in both Sweden and Europe, and as expected does an excellent job summarizing the state of scholarship. He also uses examples and quotes from articles published in Scandinavian news media to illustrate the narrative. The result is a short and informative but easy to read answer to both how and why the Scandinavian welfare states seem to work so well.
The short book provides the reader with insight into Scandinavian culture, an explanation of the causes of the nations’ exceptional rise from poverty, an overview of their recent political-economic history, the distinct structure and evolution of the Scandinavian welfare state, the origins of their egalitarianism and gender equality, and the effect of immigration. I will briefly touch on three of these areas.
First, Sanandaji makes clear that the rosy story of the Scandinavian welfare state, as it is usually told, is at best incomplete. The Scandinavian countries were among the European continent’s poorest by the end of the 19th century and were largely unaffected by the industrialization that had started centuries earlier in the United Kingdom. A combination of classical liberal reform and the adoption of industrialized production created a century-long “golden age,” as Bergh (2014) denotes the period approximately 1870–1970 in Sweden, of economic growth and rapidly rising standards of living.
This growth was partly also made possible by a distinct Scandinavian culture, which is characterized by the “[h]igh levels of trust, a strong work ethic and social cohesion [that] are the perfect starting point for successful economies” (p. 7). As Sanandaji points out, the market-aligned virtues of Scandinavian culture also explain the limited impact of the welfare state as it was erected and ballooned in the 1930s and beyond. Cultural change takes time, and thus old values lag in the face of political change. So it took time for the Scandinavian virtues to give way to the destructive incentives of the welfare state.
It should also be noted, though Sanandaji fails to make this point clearly, that after the welfare state was established, and during its several decades of expansion, it’s growth rate tended to be lower than that of the overall economy. The increasing burden was therefore, in relative terms, marginal. That is, until the radical 1960s and 1970s when Scandinavian governments, and the Swedish government in particular, adopted very expansionist welfare policies. (This political shift is analyzed in detail in, e.g., Bergh.)3
Sanandaji also presents interesting data with respect to Scandinavian gender equality. His discussion begins with the internationally enviable women’s labor market participation rate in Scandinavian countries, and especially Sweden. The background, however, is that Sweden’s government had adopted a radical agenda for population control formulated by Gunnar and Alva Myrdal (yes, the same Gunnar Myrdal who shared the 1974 economics prize with Hayek). The gist of this reform was to enforce a shared responsibility between parents and “the community” for children’s upbringing. By raising taxes on income while offering government-run daycare services, families were incentivized (if not “forced,” economically speaking) to secure two full-time incomes.
Interestingly, while this indeed rapidly increased women’s participation in the labor market, Sanandaji notes that “few women in the Nordic nations reach the position of business leaders, and even fewer manage to climb to the very top positions of directors and chief executives” (p. 102). Part of the reason is that jobs that women typically choose, including education and healthcare, are monopolized in the vast public sectors. As a result, women at trapped in careers where employers do not compete for their competence and many leadership positions are political.
This development is indirectly illustrated in a terrifying statistic from Sweden’s labor market: “Between 1950 and 2000, the Swedish population grew from seven to almost nine million. But astonishingly the net job creation in the private sector was close to zero” (p. 33).
Finally, Sanandaji addresses the issue of immigration and shows that the Scandinavian nations were exceptionally good at integration, with greater labor participation for immigrants than other Western nations, prior to the radicalization of the welfare state. Thereafter, due to rigid labor regulations and vast welfare benefits, immigrants were more or less kept out of Scandinavian job markets.
The literature identifies two potential explanations. First, the anti-business and job-protection policies practically exclude anyone with a lack of work experience, highly sought-after skills, or those with lacking proficiency in the language or limited network. This keeps immigrants as well as young people unemployed (the very high youth unemployment rates in Scandinavia illustrate this problem). Second, the promises of the universal welfare state tend to attract people who are less interested in working their way to the top and thus have a lacking work ethic.
This explains the recent problems in Scandinavia with respect to immigration, which is essentially an integration and policy problem — not a foreign-people problem.
Overall, Sanandaji’s book provides plenty of insights and a coherent explanation for the rise of the Scandinavian nations and their welfare states. Their impressive standard of living is a free-market story, which is rooted in an economically sound culture. This culture also supported the welfare state, until decades of destructive incentives eroded the nations’ sound values. The welfare state, after its radicalization, was soon crushed under its own weight, and Scandinavia has since undergone vast free-market reforms that again have contributed to economic growth and prosperity.
Considering the full story, Sanandaji summarizes the example of the Northern European welfare states simply and bluntly: “Scandinavia is entirely unexceptional.”
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