The American dream may be a musty old relic in the minds of some American elites, but for Annique Lambe—who arrived in the U.S. 12 years ago from Ireland—it is alive and well. Now a schoolteacher in Manhattan, she marvels at the energy and opportunity that she and other friends who are also recent immigrants from Europe have found on these shores. “New York is a huge place where something is always happening,” she says in a soft Irish lilt. “Now I am a part of it, living among the big towers and the skyline. It seems miraculous to me.”

From the seventeenth century on, waves of immigrants from the European continent played a primary role in forming America. It was not mainly the rich, powerful, or well-connected of Europe who came, but those of a more modest station. A simple working person in America had a far better chance of rising into the comfortable classes than his European counterpart, and his offspring’s chances were even greater yet. Most new arrivals to America eventually enjoyed a leap upward in quality of life and social mobility.

Yet even as the European masses headed to this side of the Atlantic for a better life, some intellectual and social elites insisted that Europe’s culture was better than anything found in the United States. As an intellectual, cultural, and artistic center, Europe was unsurpassed. That belief remains powerful today. Some, like American writer Richard Florida, have even suggested that some of the brightest and most culturally sophisticated young Americans—the much-ballyhooed “creative class”—may in the future seek their fortunes in Europe. Glowing journalistic anecdotes about cities such as Prague, Berlin, Paris, London, and Dublin have suggested that significant numbers of America’s best and brightest may end up expatriating themselves to the continent.

New Yorkers have a perfect one-word response for such claims: fuggedaboutit. Europe may be a great place to visit, but U.S. emigration to the continent is paltry—while the reverse flow from Europe to the United States remains at consistently high levels even with the somewhat bothersome screenings imposed after 9/11. While Europeans are no longer the primary  immigrants to the U.S. (that role having been taken over by Latin Americans and Asians), they remain an important factor in the continuing re-invention of America.

As in the past, immigrants from France, Italy, Germany and other parts of Europe continue to come to America to participate in an economy that is more dynamic, healthier, and generally more open than what they are leaving behind. America’s economic appeal has been broadened by Europe’s long-term competitive decline; its portion of world GDP dropped from 34 percent to 20 percent between 1913 and 1998, while the United States held its own at about 22 percent of global GDP (even amidst the Third World boom of the last generation).

Most recently, Europe’s position has weakened considerably. Since the 1970s, America has created some 57 million new jobs, compared to just 4 million in Europe (with most of those in government). For the last quarter century, the United States has enjoyed consistently higher rates of economic growth and productivity than European countries, and the gap has been widening. The United States is now at the forefront in many critical global industries, particularly finance, technology, and entertainment.

The future doesn’t look much brighter for the continent. Under current conditions, according to the European Central Bank, the Euro Zone’s overall growth potential is roughly half that of the United States. The wishful notion that the E.U. would overtake the United States as the world’s “most competitive, knowledge-based economy” by 2010, much discussed at the time of European unification, has now been dismissed, even by many Europeans themselves, as wildly over-optimistic.

Under such circumstances, the United States remains a tremendous lure for many Europeans, especially younger, educated individuals. This is particularly true in technological fields, where Europe’s best brains are leaving in droves. Some 400,000 E.U. science and technology graduates currently reside in the United States, and barely one in seven, according to a recent European Commission poll, intend to return. “The U.S. is a sponge that’s happy to soak up talent from across the globe,” observes one Irish scientist.

Similar perspectives can be found in a host of other cutting-edge industries, including financial services, where, with the exception of London, New York has an almost unparalleled global appeal. Attempts to build a new European financial center in Frankfurt—sometimes called “Mainhattan” after the river running through the western German city—or in Paris, have failed to meet even modest expectations.

Finally there is culture. Hollywood and the American music industry have long dominated European markets, despite massive government subsidies for the continent’s culture-based industries. More recently, even once-powerful European cultural industries such as fashion have become more influenced by American designers and ideas.

America’s superior per capita income, its leadership of critical global industries, and its higher quality of life are reflected in everything from housing space to consumer prices. This is all the more remarkable given that the country continues to absorb poor migrants from across the globe. America’s demographic vitality makes it nearly one of a kind among modern nations.

Thanks to significantly higher fertility rates and immigration, America’s population is growing far faster than Europe’s, particularly Spain’s, Italy’s, and Germany’s. Europe has far more old people than the United States, and a shrinking workforce. Even amidst high unemployment, there remain persistent shortages of technical workers. Overall labor-force participation in the E.U. is well below that of the United States.

Europe’s percentage of the world’s population has now fallen below 7 percent, down from 12 percent in 1950. It is expected to drop to barely 4 percent by 2050. These are not auspicious conditions either for future sales or the supply of ambitious workers. In some European countries, such as Italy, the number of deaths already exceeds births. By 2025, the average age in Europe will be 45, six years older than in the United States. By 2050 many European countries—including those of the former eastern bloc—could suffer loss of population.

Europe remains home to the world’s greatest historic cities, but many of them are losing people, too. Many American cities have enjoyed healthy population increases—not just sunbelt capitals like Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Houston but also older cities like New York City (largely due to immigration). Growing communities are generally friendlier for both employers and job-seekers.

These demographic factors place Europeans at a disadvantage. Since much of the immigration to Europe comes from poorly educated (for the most part) workers from Africa and the Middle East, it has not appreciably increased the continent’s supply of skilled workers. There is also deep-seated hostility to the newcomers among natives; nearly a third of E.U. citizens describe themselves as decidedly “prejudiced” against the continent’s current immigrants. In addition, the powerful welfare state mechanisms in Europe tend to keep both newcomers and displaced native workers out of the workforce and on the dole, further exacerbating the pressures on the economy and the social resentments.

To a large extent, Europe has also turned its back on new industries and younger people, choosing security for the current population over future opportunity. So despite large numbers of retiring workers in France, for instance, unemployment among the young has been rising—with joblessness among workers in their twenties now well exceeding 20 percent. The European welfare state also forces younger workers to pay heavily for a radically escalating number of pensioners and benefit recipients. Since 1970, Germany’s ranks of unemployed and retired have soared by some 80 percent, while the working population grew by a mere 4 percent. This is one reason why taxes are so high on German and other European wage earners.

Amidst all this, it is perhaps not surprising that a powerful new wave of European immigration to the U.S. is taking place. This trend began in the 1980s, with fashionable affluents from West European capitals, and expanded to include many Eastern Europeans after the fall of communism. The wave has gradually grown to include Russian Jews, refugees from the Balkans, and new Italian, German, British, Greek, Polish, and other immigrants. Eastern European immigrants constituted one out of four New York immigrants in the late 1990s. They have also become an important factor in places like Los Angeles, Chicago, and Boston. Even relatively out of the way places like Utica, New York and St. Louis have been revitalized by waves of European immigrants from new places like Bosnia.

All told, European immigration to the United States jumped by some 16 percent during the 1990s. Europe’s percentage of total immigrants to the U.S. rose crisply between 1998 and 2001. Visa applications dropped after 9/11, but then increased last year by 10 percent. The total number of European-born Americans increased by roughly 700,000 during the last three years, with a heavy inflow from the former Soviet Union, the former Yugoslavia, Romania, and France. These new immigrants have dispersed across many parts of the country, but have been especially drawn to New York, California, and Florida. Today’s westward human flow across the Atlantic is more critical to the future of the United States than mere numbers can indicate. In contrast to many of our other immigrants, newcomers from Europe, particularly those under 40, tend to be highly educated. And while frivolous “Eurotrash” socialites may gain the attention of the press, most young European migrants are hard-working, professionally serious, and ambitious.

New York City, the traditional center of European immigration, provides an excellent case in point. An analysis of recent census numbers indicates that white immigrants to New York (the vast majority of whom are from Europe) represent the largest number of contributors to the net growth of educated young people in the city. Without the disproportionate contributions of these young Europeans, New York would actually have suffered a net outflow of educated people under 35 during the late 1990s. Overall, there are now half a million New York City residents who were born in Europe.

St. Louis is another city that has benefited enormously from European immigration—in its case, the growth of a Bosnian community now estimated at well over 10,000. Since the Bosnians’ appearance on the city’s south side, they have transformed their neighborhoods. South Grand Avenue, once a dying thoroughfare, has been turned by entrepreneurial-minded newcomers into a major center of Bosnian commerce. In typical American style, the community is gradually spreading to the city’s sprawling suburbs.

“When we got here, South St. Louis was a city of ghosts. But we were survivors,” notes Bosnian immigrant and entrepreneur Amir Holtic. “You drop a Bosnian on the moon and he’ll survive. We are the people who help give the city a future.”

As Holtic would be quick to point out, an economy is driven, more than anything else, by the energies of people who can still dream. Although many American intellectuals and urbanites hold European cities in higher regard than our own, many young everyday Europeans have discovered that American metropolises are often more exciting, more liveable, and, most important of all, better places to find opportunities for upward mobility.

Many young European professionals slide easily into New York because it is one of the few places in America that continues to feature concentrated European immigrant neighborhoods

like Astoria (Greek), Bensonhurst (Italian), Brighton Beach (Russian), Sunnyside (Irish), and Greenpoint (Polish). Although most young immigrants do not live in these traditional areas, they rely on associations and grapevine networks based there, they find familiar places of worship in these areas, they dine (and work) at local restaurants, and place ads in, and read, newspapers that originate in these locales.

New York’s long history of Irish settlement offered Annique Lambe a ready-made entry point. “The Irish history goes a long way here,” Lambe notes. “ I met an Irishman at a bar my second day in New York. Instantly, the fact that I was Irish was enough. I was in, like I was born here.”

But if cultural ties make arrivals in the U.S. relatively painless, it is opportunity that is the real magnet. “In the past,” notes one Polish newspaper editor, “it was freedom of religion or politics that pulled us here. Now it’s the economy.”

Like many former communist countries, Poland has a persistent shortage of good jobs for its large numbers of educated people, and unemployment that ranges above 20 percent. “There are many talented young people in Poland, but not a lot of work,” notes Michael Dabrowski, a Polish trader in his late twenties. “Here there are lots of openings for skilled and energetic people.”

The largest group of newcomers in New York City today hails from the former Soviet Union. In the 1970s, many came to escape oppression. Lately, they have been coming for economic openings. Max Driven, a 29-year-old Russian from St. Petersburg came to New York eight years ago with $500 in his pocket. He now works in real estate and already owns several brownstones in Jersey City. He was amazed by how he was able to leverage properties to buy more properties. “There’s no financing like that in Russia,” he says. “Capital is the key to being here.”

With this common draw of financial reward for astute work, U.S. cities are producing the kind of pan-European melting pot that is all too often only a dream on the European continent. “This is a place for Europeans, “ observes Michael Idov, an immigrant from Latvia who writes in both Russian and English. “Think of all the Brits in the publishing industry. In the art world, every other young person you meet is French or Italian. Most of the Russians are in computer science. It’s a kind of pan-European society.”

It is a distinctly American dream that brings Europeans to America. For most migrants, America became the place to move after it became apparent that personal re-invention and success were out of reach at home. The hunger for greater socio-economic mobility is strongest among those in business. It is not surprising that ambitious young European professionals prefer the faster-paced economic environment of the United States.

“I love the business culture in New York,” says Volker Detering, a former Green Party activist from Germany who came to New York in 1999. Along with his brother Dietmar, he has founded a thriving Web site business specializing in event planning and networking—something that would be exceedingly difficult to establish and grow in heavily regulated Germany.

For newcomers like Detering, there is a kind of magical appreciation for America that even some natives do not recognize. At a time when less than half of all residents of the New York metropolitan area visit the city center at least five times a year (while three quarters claim their lives are barely affected by what goes on inside Gotham), today’s new Euro-originated New Yorkers reveal an almost unbridled enthusiasm for the city.

“To me, with all its flaws, New York is still the most special place in the world,” exults Max Driven. “Petersburg is nice, but New York has everything; it is everything. It’s the place for your ambitions.”

Beneath the European hostility toward America stirred up by 9/11 and the Afghan and Iraq wars, a much deeper verdict on the United States is being rendered by hundreds of thousands of individual Europeans. These men and women, some of their continent’s most energetic residents, are uprooting themselves for brand new lives in America. The continuing immigration of some of the Old World’s best and brightest suggests that the American experiment has not lost its power. Nor have all Europeans lowered their horizons to a mere steady-state replication of past comforts.

Even now, many Europeans dream fiercely of a better place. And for a surprising number of them, that place is still America.

Joel Kotkin is a senior fellow with the New America Foundation and author of The City: A Global History. This article was written with support from the Newman Real Estate Institute at Baruch College and the Center for an Urban Future in New York City.

By Stephan Karlsson - Publicado en el sitio web del Instituto von Mises http://www.mises.org/story/2259 

Recently, the so-called Swedish model — that is, the Swedish economic system with high taxes and a big welfare state — has been celebrated again in the press.

The alleged recent success of the Swedish economy has allowed welfare statists both inside and outside of Sweden to argue that high taxes and an extensive welfare state are good for the economy. To fully understand this fallacy, we should review Sweden's economic history.

Until the second half of the 19th century, Sweden was fairly poor. But far-reaching free market reforms in the 1860s allowed Sweden to benefit from the spreading Industrial Revolution.

And so, during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Sweden saw its economy rapidly industrializing, driven by the many Swedish inventors and entrepreneurs.

During that time, Sweden produced extraordinarily many inventions, given its small population, including: dynamite, invented by Alfred Nobel (who established the Nobel Prize); the self-aligning ball bearing, invented by Sven Wingquist (who used this to create the SKF company); the sun-valve, invented by Gustav Dahlén (who used it to found industrial gas company AGA); the gas absorption refrigerator, invented by Baltzar von Platen (which was later used by Electrolux).

In addition, there were countless non-inventing entrepreneurs during that period: car manufacturers Volvo and Saab, and telecommunications company Ericsson. Indeed, with just a few exceptions, nearly all large Swedish companies were started during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which was not only a period of strong growth, but also the time when the foundation for later economic growth was laid.

Another factor which continued Swedish prosperity was the fact that Sweden was able to stay out of both World Wars, and indeed all other wars as well. Sweden is in fact the country with the longest consecutive period of peace, having fought no war since 1809, when Sweden was invaded by Russia, losing Finland to the invader.

Sweden has thus enjoyed 5 more years of peace than Switzerland, which participated in the Napoleonic wars in 1814. As a result of its free market policies, the resourcefulness of its people, and its successful avoidance of war, Sweden had the highest per-capita income growth in the world between 1870 and 1950, by which time Sweden had become one of the world's richest countries, behind only the United States and Switzerland, and Denmark (who have since also fallen behind because of high taxes).

But the foundation for future trouble had already been created. In 1932, the Social Democrats rose to power in the face of the Great Depression. And like FDR in America and Adolf Hitler in Germany, they started to expand government power over the economy. Until 1932, government spending had been kept below 10% of GDP in Sweden, but the Social Democrats, under their leader Per Albin Hansson, wanted to change this and remake Sweden into a "folkhem" ("people's home"), a term Swedish Social Democrats adopted from the Fascists in Italy.

Even in the early 1950s, Sweden was still one of the freest economies in the world, and government spending relative to GDP was in fact below the American level.

But between 1950 and 1976, Sweden experienced an expansion in government spending unprecedented during a period of peace, with government spending to GDP rising from about 20% in 1950 to more than 50% in 1975. Virtually every year, taxes were increased while the welfare state expanded relentlessly, both in the form of a sharp increase in the number of government employees and ever more transfer payment benefits.

During the first 20 years, this relentless government expansion took place seemingly without ill effect, as Sweden benefited from rapid global growth — although Sweden's growth had already started to slip in relative terms, from well above average to just average. This changed in the 1970s after Olof Palme, from the left wing of the Social Democratic party became Prime Minister. Palme stepped up the socialist transformation in Sweden, rapidly increasing anti-business regulations and sharply increased payroll taxes.

The payroll-tax increases, along with increasing wage demands from unions, made Swedish businesses highly uncompetitive on the global markets, something which Palme decided to solve by devaluing the Swedish krona. As a result, price inflation rose sharply, leading to repeated devaluations. Popular discontent from the economic woes created by the global economic downturn, the massive tax increases, the increased regulations, and the increasing inflation enabled the center right to come into power in 1976, breaking 44 years of uninterrupted Social Democratic rule.

But because the center-right parties were unwilling to push for more radical free-market reforms, the economic woes, including the inflation-devaluation cycle, continued. For this reason, and because the three coalition parties — the conservative Moderate Party, the Liberal Party, and the Center Party — were unable to get along, the Social Democrats returned to power in 1982.

They immediately implemented one "big bang" devaluation of 16%, which they claimed would be the last. They had claimed the same thing before all the previous devaluations, including the 10% devaluation that the center-right government had decided upon the year before. This time it appears that they actually meant it, but as with The Boy Who Cried Wolf, no one believed them.

Inflationary expectations and thus union wage demands remained very high. And in 1985, the government decided to deregulate bank lending. While this reform was necessary in order to improve capital allocation, it had disastrous side effects given the fact that at the time, real interest rates were way below zero after tax and inflation. This caused a massive credit expansion, which in turn helped further aggravate consumer price inflation while also creating a massive stock- and real estate bubble. As the exchange rate remained fixed, Swedish competitiveness was quickly undermined.

After Palme was killed by an unknown assassin in February 1986, pragmatist Ingvar Carlsson became prime minister. Worried that Swedish growth had trailed most other countries, Carlsson's government implemented a number of free-market reforms. Among these were the lifting of all currency controls in 1989 and a tax reform that dramatically reduced marginal tax rates (although they also reduced a number of deductions, including deductions for interest payments). Although these reforms have arguably contributed to improving the long-term economic performance of Sweden, they would contribute to precipitating the deep economic downturn in the early 1990s.

Meanwhile, as the economy started slowing significantly in 1990 after a series of tightening measures, consumer price inflation slowed. With the combination of continued high nominal interest rates, reduced capital gains taxation (and with that, reduced deductions for interest payments) and falling price inflation, real interest rates started rising significantly, helping to end the asset price bubbles. On top of all of this came the oil price shock following Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait and an economic downturn in key trading partners such as the United States, the United Kingdom, and Finland. The end result was that Sweden slipped into a recession in late 1990.

As Sweden fell into a recession and its highly cyclical government budget balance started to deteriorate rapidly, investor confidence in the Swedish fixed-exchange-rate scheme started to deteriorate rapidly.

And with currency controls abolished a few years ago, the krona was fair game for currency speculators. Unlike in the past, the government was determined not to devalue, and they deemed a return to strict currency controls as unthinkable, so they had no choice but to defend the currency by raising interest rates. But as the currency speculators knew that these interest rate levels could not be sustained, they renewed their attacks, knowing that their gain from a collapsed currency regime would be far greater than the interest rate levels the Riksbank could offer. The end result was that real after-tax interest rates were pushed up into double digit levels — after having been negative just a few years earlier. That in turn deepened the recession further.

In the end, though, the fixed-exchange-rate scheme collapsed in November 1992. The dramatic increase in interest rates and the deep recession had at the same time created a large amount of bad loans, making almost all major banks in effect bankrupt. (The exception was Handelsbanken, known for its more cautious lending practices.) Only after the Swedish government pledged they would bail out the banks with whatever money they needed was a widespread banking collapse averted.

All told, the recession became Sweden's deepest by far since the Great Depression, with GDP in 1993 being 5% lower than in 1990, with employment falling more than 10%, and the budget deficit rising to more than 10% of GDP. By then Sweden had fallen to between 15th and 20th place in international income comparisons, a decline from which it has never
since recovered.

After this deep downturn, Sweden has performed much better for a number of reasons. The 20% decline in the value of the krona in late 1992 gave a strong boost to exports and together with the dramatic lowering of interest rates, this helped kick-start a cyclical recovery in late 1993. Moreover, a number of free market reforms implemented during Ingvar Carlsson and conservative Carl Bildt (who was Prime Minister between 1991 and 1994) had helped raise the structural growth potential of the Swedish economy.

Apart from the already mentioned reforms of reduced marginal tax rates and abolished currency controls, deregulated bank lending and significantly lower inflation, this included privatizations of several state-owned companies and deregulation of several key sectors, including the retail sector, the telecommunications sector and the airline industry. Also, when the massive budget deficit was eliminated, even the Social Democrats realized the need for deep spending cuts, which together with the typical cyclical decline in the burden of spending during booms helped reduce the extremely bloated burden of government spending somewhat.

All of this has helped Sweden recover in relative terms from the stagnation of the 1970s and 1980s and the deep economic downturn in the early 1990s. It is this relative recovery that is now seized upon by the Social Democrats and their sympathizers inside and outside of Sweden when they claim that the Swedish model of high taxes and a big welfare state is successful.

Yet as should be clear, the relative improvement of performance is due not to high taxes (lower now than previously), but to free-market reforms.

The reason Sweden no longer trails the rest of Europe is that these reforms, which have not been implemented in most continental European countries, have made the Swedish economy relatively freer.

And even with these reforms, Sweden has not, in fact, performed better than the rest of Europe. While headline GDP growth has been slightly higher, this advantage disappears when taking into account that Sweden's terms of trade have deteriorated significantly.

And if we exclude heavy-weight laggards Germany and Italy, Sweden has in fact continued to fall behind the Continent, event with Europe's dismal performance compared to most other parts of the world.

If we look beneath the aggregate production figures, we can see deep structural problems. The number of people employed is now 6% lower than in 1990, a weaker development than in any other western economy. By contrast, even with the weak job growth in recent years (by American standards), employment in the United States is 20% higher than in 1990.

And the number of people employed in Sweden is actually lower than in 1980, too. You have to go back to the mid-1970s to find employment numbers lower than the current ones. While total employment has been roughly unchanged since 1975, it masks a significant decline in male employment. And if you look only at the private sector, employment is now at a level lower than in 1950.

Social Democrats still often claim that Sweden has a comparatively high employment rate, but this claim is based on deceptive employment statistics that count as employed many who have been on long-term sick leave or in some other way on the receiving end of transfer payment programs, even though they don't actually work.

Moreover, the "stay at home mom" is very rare in Sweden. Because of the incentives created by the feminist construction of the Swedish welfare system, mothers mostly leave their children at government day care centers. Even if you believe that mothers who stay home to take care of their children are the victims of patriarchical oppression, you cannot deny the childcare takes a lot of work, but only those who take care of other people's children count as employed. By shifting childcare from the home to the public sector, the government further exaggerates Swedish employment figures.

The headline unemployment rate in Sweden is only 5–5.5%, but this number is extremely misleading as it only includes a small number of the people who the government pays not to work. Many unemployed are sent to so-called "labor market political activities" — activities whose only purpose is to reduce the official unemployment rate.

If we ignore this ruse, unemployment is 8%. And if you also include the enormous number of early retirees and people who live off sickness benefits, the real unemployment rate is more like 25%. The number of early retirees is 540,000, more than double the number of officially unemployed. Among non-Western immigrants, the real unemployment rate is higher than 50%.

All of this is exactly what we should expect from transfer payment benefits to people who don't work, from massive payroll taxes, income taxes, and value-added taxes. This has greatly inhibited the growth of a labor-intensive private-service sector that could have provided jobs for many of the unemployed immigrants.

During the most recent year, however, growth has picked up significantly in Sweden. To some extent, this reflects the global cyclical upswing, but there is also a domestic Swedish factor at work here, which has helped push Swedish growth higher than in most European countries. After the painful fiasco of the fixed-exchange-rate regime in 1992, Sweden instead adopted inflation targeting.

This monetary policy regime seems so far to have been significantly more successful, but the policy is creating new problems. Because of deregulation and increased competition in a number of sectors in recent years, consumer price inflation has been fairly low, indeed below the 2% target most of the time. Food prices, for example, have been falling as fierce competition from low-price chains like Lidl, Netto, and Willys, have forced the major supermarket chains to cut prices in order to keep their customers.

Low prices are good for consumers, of course, but according to the inflation-targeting dogma, too low a rate of price inflation is itself a problem — a problem that must be counteracted with increased monetary inflation. Thus the Riksbank has been forced to push down interest rates dramatically in order to boost money supply enough to help achieve a 2% consumer price inflation rate.

As consumer price inflation is now starting to creep back up toward 2%, it appears that they will be successful, but this will have come at the cost of unleashing an asset price bubble and household debt levels similar to the levels experienced in the late 1980s.

Money supply rose 11.5% in Sweden in the year to May, even higher than the 8.9% seen in the Euro-zone. It is the dramatic acceleration of monetary inflation in 2005 which has temporarily boosted Swedish growth. The timing of this boom is, it should be noted, very convenient for the ruling Social Democrats and their parliamentary allies, the Green Party and the communist Left Party, given the fact that they face an election this year in September.

Ultimately, this artificial boom will have to come to an end, and although the ensuing crisis will likely not be as deep as in the early 1990s, the seemingly impressive Swedish boom will certainly be revealed as a fraud — just as the whole story of the success of the Swedish economic model is a fraud.

Stefan M.I. Karlsson is an economist currently working in Sweden. Read his blog. Send him mail. See his Mises articles. Comment on the Mises blog.

See also "How the Welfare State Corrupted Sweden."

Número de piscinas interiores (indoor swimming pools) por cada 100.000 habitantes.

1 por cada 50.000 habitantes en Europa del Oeste. 1 por cada 300.000 habitantes en Europa del Este http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/07/060718091506.htm

En la ciudad de West Covina, 1 de cada 6 casas tiene piscina http://www.westcov.org/kids/drown.html , más piscinas per cápita que en ningún otro condado.

Palm Springs tiene más piscinas por habitante que ninguna otra área de la nación http://www.ps4rent.com/about.htm

Región tiene más piscinas per cápita que ninguna otra área de Canadá http://www.warpfish.com/jhan/Essay/community.shtml

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http://www.azcentral.com/specials/special06/articles/0927river-squeeze0927.html

There has been some effort to use less water. Car wash places are required to recycle the water used. Industrial and commercial business have some restrictions on how they use water. Residents have little or no knowledge about the water we use or the billions of gallons lost to evaporation from open ponds and swimming pools. Central Arizona has more swimming pools per capita than any where else on the planet.

Realestate developers have been strong in keeping the public from knowing where our water comes from and THAT THIS IS A DESERT we live in. Refrigerated A/C and abundent water has allowed the huge population growth. However, we are fast approaching the critical point of water usage that may well destroy, or at least curtail, the growth in Arizona.Efforts may help get more water from Colo. River

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http://www.samizdata.net/blog/archives/2005/04/dead_weight.html

Mark Steyn recently hit the nail on the head, taking another angle at European nanny statism. Life over there is more and more like spending your life being a teenager. You have zero choice on everything that matters hugely in your life : education, security and safety, health care, retirement. A huge chunk of your money is taken to impose inefficient, wasteful and corrupt one-size-fits-all 'solutions' to all these.

You are free to spend the rest - the pocket money Nanny is kind enough to leave you as an allowance - on trinkets such as pint-size cars, DVDs, CDs and Michael Moore books. Oh, and don't forget the 20% VAT on those. Thank you.