Is Sweden a Socialist Utopia? @DrMaxham with @CarlSvanberg

The latest episode of the Yaron Brook Show has been hosted by Amanda Maxham, a speaker which I happen to know already from her speeches on GMO and past hosting of the same show, during the frequent travels of Yaron Brook.

Amanda was also a guest of Alex Epstein’s “Power Hour” podcast when Alex Epstein slightly changes course from energy to cover GMOs, one of Amanda’s topic of research, which she covered also in this paper, also referred to in the podcast object of this post.

Today’s show topic was the myth of socialist scandinavian countries such as Sweden and Denmark, which are mistakenly used by the left as proof that socialism works, and that it brings wealth and good lifestyles in the countries where socialism is applied by the ruling coalition.

The discussion is quite interesting, and focuses on the many memes which circulate on social media, falsely portraying a mythical socialist society where things work well.

Except that neither Sweden nor Denmark are socialist countries.

They are very much mixed economies, with a high social cost due to fairly high taxation, which has rendered being an entrepreneur in such countries almost a nightmare.

This is confirmed in many different ways by the guest of the show, Carl Svanberg, who is a Swede, so he knows a thing or five about his country, and about the many companies which have fled or shut down since the country turned more toward socialism in the 1980s.

IKEA was mentioned a number of times during the show, but I should add something which was probably not known to Amanda not Carl.

Ingvar Kamprad, the founder of IKEA, has lived here in Switzerland from 1976 until 2014, and at age 88 he decided to return back to Sweden. And IKEA’s holding company, Inter IKEA Holding SA, is based in Luxembourg, a famous tax haven in the center of Europe.

This is yet another proof of the fact that rich people “vote with their feet” and are able to have a better life in freer countries such as Switzerland, and can move the center of their assets in other countries where the fiscal burden is lower.

The final part of the show is also very much worth listening to, as it’s focused on Amanda’s strongest topic, genetic engineering.

If you like flowers, you have to listen to it. And if you like research on plant genetics and some history, you’re in for a treat.

Sometimes it’s not too bad to be missing Yaron during his travels!

 

The two US Presidential candidates roasting each other

This US Presidential campaign has been truly remarkable, mostly in a bad way, with lots of foul play and needless rudeness from both sides.

We are finally getting closer to the vote on November the 8th (yes, remember, it’s November the 8th, not January!) and thankfully the debates are over. But we will see more drivel coming from left and right, that is for sure.

Last Monday October 17th though there was a different opportunity for a fierce conflict between the two candidates, this time not as a debate, but rather with two separate speeches at a charity dinner in New York City, where both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump were present.

Trump spoke first, then Clinton spoke immediately after.

The two videos have been published on YouTube, and what is amazing to notice is that Trump’s speech has had more than 4 times the viewers of Clinton’s, were are talking more than 2 million views for Trump, and little more than 500 thousand views for Clinton as of today.

Hillary vs Donald

Donald Trump’s speech is here.

Hillary Clinton’s speech is here.

Both speeches are very much worth watching, as they have been used by the two candidates to keep beating each other up, in many different and creative ways, even sometimes with a lot of humour, yet a very serious humour.

I will leave it to my readers to decide which one of the two candidates was more convincing and compelling. I have my views, and maybe the difference in the number of views of the two speeches can also tell a tale.

One thing is for sure. We should all be very happy that this campaign will soon be over. Either way, we will have a President of the US which will be leading a very divided country, and she or he will not have an easy job at hand.

@seiercapital Lars Seier Christensen on Ayn Rand’s new revolution

Lars Seier Christensen is one of the founding members of Saxo Bank of Denmark, a very successful financial institution he created with his partners, and ran using Ayn Rand’s Seven Virtues as a guiding beacon, with great success. He left Saxo Bank at the beginning of 2016, to form his one-man investment company, Seier Capital.

On September 29th 2016, in New York, the Ayn Rand Institute held a fund-raising dinner during which Lars Seier Christensen was the keynote speaker.

The whole speech is very much worth reading, but the final part of his remarks gave me goose bumps, as they are oh so very true:

If we don’t succeed in changing the values and direction of at least the next generation, I fear the full prediction of Atlas Shrugged will become reality – and while that may hold some promise for the distant future, it is not something that I think people of my age feel like going through if we can avoid it.

We need a revolution. A revolution of rationality.

Yes, we need a whole lot more rationality. Something which seems to be very much absent in politics on a worldwide basis, as of late. Sadly so.

The full text of his speech can be found here.

And if you have not yet read “Atlas Shrugged”, I urge you to invest some time to read it. Now.

Yaron Brook speaking at The Ayn Rand Institute Revolution Dinner, New York 2016-09-29
Yaron Brook speaking at The Ayn Rand Institute Revolution Dinner, New York 2016-09-29