One of the amusing aspects of Matthew Yglesias's blog is his 1966 liberal obsession with the superiority of the Blue-Eyed Utopias of Northwestern Europe. Each week he puts up a half-dozen or so posts on the general theme of "They do it better in Spitzbergen." For example, here's the opening of today's essay on "Postal Service in Scandinavia."
Hmmhmmhmm ... There must be some common denominator among the postal systems of Norway, Sweden, and Denmark that makes them so good. Obviously, the reason for the difference in quality of postal service between Scandinavia and the Brown-Eyed Dystopias such as Italy, with their excessive clutter of paintings, statues, and other useless junk, must be some wonkish detail in organizational structure.
When considering a policy issue like the quality of mail delivery it’s often intriguing to ask oneself “how is this done in Scandinavia?” What appears to be the case is that the government of Denmark quasi-privatized its postal services, creating an independent corporation called Post Danmark that’s partially owned by a private equity firm, partially owned by the firm’s employees, and partially owned by the Danish state.
Meanwhile, Sweden has a state-run postal agency but a deregulated market in postal services. So the state-owned Posten AB needs to compete with a firm called Bring CityMail. Bring CityMail operates as a private company in Denmark and Sweden, but it’s actually a subsidiary of the Norwegian state postal service. Meanwhile, in order to better compete with this Norwegian juggernaut, Sweden’s publicly owned postal service and Denmark’s semi-public postal service are merging to form Posten Norden AB. This is going to be organized as a private firm, though a large share of the ownership will be in the hands of the Danish and Swedish governments.
Hmmhmmhmm ... There must be some common denominator among the postal systems of Norway, Sweden, and Denmark that makes them so good. Obviously, the reason for the difference in quality of postal service between Scandinavia and the Brown-Eyed Dystopias such as Italy, with their excessive clutter of paintings, statues, and other useless junk, must be some wonkish detail in organizational structure.
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
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213 comments:
«Oldest ‹Older 201 – 213 of 213Once again we've reached the point where I point out to Truth that his ideology (forced integration of the races) creates his problem (whites complaining about blacks), wonder aloud why "Truth" never, ever, ever addresses this point, and then I roll the dice to see if Komment Kontrol will allow such disrespect toward a black man.
~Svigor
Well, we've discovered another bug in the blogger.com software - it doesn't properly handle the rollover at the 200 comment threshold.
"Real" wealth? You are mired deep in Marxism, friend.
-Heinl
How is "forced integration of the races" my ideology? I may seem knowledgeable to you Svig, but contrary to popular belief, I was not around in 1497.
Point two; "whites complaining about blacks" is not my problem; whiny whites who don't have lives, and don't understand how the world works is my problem (same, BTW as my problem is with whiny blacks).
You are free to complain about whatever you want. I am free to counter your complaints, which I decide to do when they are as feeble minded, and easily disputable as 'there was no black input in the electronics field.' Lewis Latimer was the chief assistant to both Alexander Grahm Bell and Thomas Edison; he has patents in the field himself. Voila, myth debunked.
You, from what I have gathered, live in a half-black city in one of he blackest states in America. You are as much in favor of "forced integration" as anyone else, if not, one could only assume you would take up residence in New Hampshire or Wyoming.
Don't tell me "my widu toeseys will get cold up dair." Life, my friend, is all about priorities.
Filament for Light Bulb
Lewis Latimer invented the carbon filament in 1881 or 1882? No!
English chemist/physicist Joseph Swan experimented with a carbon-filament incandescent light all the way back in 1860, and by 1878 had developed a better design which he patented in Britain. On the other side of the Atlantic, Thomas Edison developed a successful carbon-filament bulb, receiving a patent for it (#223898) in January 1880, before Lewis Latimer did any work in electric lighting. From 1880 onward, countless patents were issued for innovations in filament design and manufacture (Edison had over 50 of them). Neither of Latimer's two filament-related patents in 1881 and 1882 were among the most important innovations, nor did they make the light bulb last longer, nor is there reason to believe they were adopted outside Hiram Maxim's company where Latimer worked at the time. (He was not hired by Edison's company until 1884, primarily as a draftsman and an expert witness in patent litigations).
Latimer also did not come up with the first screw socket for the light bulb or the first book on electric lighting.
I never said that Lewis Lattimer "invented the carbon filament" or whatever, I said that he contributed to electricity. This is obvious by the fact that he was patented in electricity.
I didn't go to one of those High falutin Ivy league schools you went to, but I do know what the word "patent" means. You should look it up.
"Real" wealth? You are mired deep in Marxism, friend.
Are you under the impression that free market economists regard colored glass beads as wealth? I'm getting the feeling that you do.
A society which can afford to spend a great deal of time and effort on creating art is by definiton already a wealthy society. So the creation of art was not what made it wealthy. This is why no Indian tribe ever gave us the Sistine Chapel, or ever could.
So, the question for intelligent people (which clearly excludes you) is - whence came the wealth which gave Leonardo the freedom to practice his craft.
The answer to that lies in real economics, and not in the half-baked libertarian twaddle you read somewhere.
"the black South Africans working in the gold mines are certainly creating wealth."
You can't eat gold. It has some industrial uses, not too important. Basically, it's only a medium of the exchange of wealth - not wealth itself.
Confusing gold with wealth is like confusing paper money with gold.
A society which can afford to spend a great deal of time and effort on creating art is by definition already a wealthy society.
As has been pointed out, all human societies value art -- even if it's just a skillfully carved wooden mask -- and consider it a form of wealth. You're saying they're all wrong, which seems like a pretty strong claim!
True, art isn't going to be that much help if you want to build a skyscraper or a gunboat. But that isn't all that human society is about. Trying to draw the line between "real" wealth and "unnecessary" luxuries is just impossible: all you do is end up normatively intuiting what you think true wealth ought to be, according to your own standards, and you learn nothing about how people actually behave. This is one of the mistakes the Marxists made.
It probably is going too far to say that a thing is worth what someone is willing to pay for it (obvious counterexamples being badly overpriced houses, as well as outright fraud). But trade in gold and art has been stable for a long time, and in most cases buyers know exactly what they are getting and are happy with it. Who are you to say they are wrong about these thinks constituting true wealth?
(Oh, and if you really do think you are capable of intuiting the "true" value of good, then tell me, which is worth more: the Mona Lisa or a sack of grain?)
The equation of marginal utility and capital is the fundamental error of modern economics. Trinkets like pictures of Madonna or the Madonna are not as valuable as a successful farm or manufacturing plant.
Gold is mostly valuable as a means of exchange, being durable, easily divisible, and rare.
Trying to draw the line between "real" wealth and "unnecessary" luxuries is just impossible: all you do is end up normatively intuiting what you think true wealth ought to be, according to your own standards ..
You keep trying to have this whole other discussion, one where you have a large stockpile of nifty arguments to trot out. But in the process you keep skipping cheerfully past the question being posed here - what is wealth and how is it created. Try addressing that for a change.
if you really do think you are capable of intuiting the "true" value of good(s)
People keep suggesting that I have said this, presumably so that they can deploy their ready-made counter-arguments. But if you look back through the thread you'll see that neither I nor anyone else has said any such thing.
The nearest anybody has come to saying that they know the "true value" of goods are the people going on about the "intrinsic value" of gold. And I'm not on their side.
I know everyone has stopped reading this post but I'm writing for my own pleasure.
I don't know about Denmark, but Sweden, my own country was for hundreds of years what we now call a failed state up to the year 1521. A few years later we converted to protestantism and since then we have been a pretty well organized country until now, with the immigration of third world people.
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