I don’t share the standard liberal progressive view of the world. That doesn’t mean I can’t point to how that vision could be achieved though, with a fiasco over Apple’s Irish data center serving as a good example.
The important thing to note being that the place held up as nirvana, the example to be followed, doesn’t do almost any of the things which liberal progressives do nor insist we should all do. All of which is rather why that nirvana works.
That standard progressive vision is that the U.S. should become more like the Nordic social democracies. OK, that’s fine, they’re nice places. But there’s more than one trick to how they work, as I’ve noted before over their taxation systems. They tax and spend locally, they’re not sending everything through their equivalent of Washington, D.C. One of the other things that is true of them is that they are notably economically free, not just more than the U.S. but most countries. The Heritage Foundation, the Fraser Institute, and other usual rankings insist that all the Nordics are very free-market indeed. They have distinctly noninterventionist economies which they then tax highly to redistribute. Again, not my desired mix, but it does work.
This Apple story shows as much. The company wanted to build a data center in the west of Ireland. Planning permission was hard to gain, not as bad as it might be in some of the U.S. coastal enclaves of liberaldom, but difficult all the same. In fact, after three years, they’ve decided to abandon the plan. That’s $1 billion or so of jobs and investments which now won’t turn up. The methods used to prevent it were similar to what we so often see in the U.S. Endless court cases and appeals over environmental issues and so on.
The interesting part being that Apple actually wanted to build two such centers:
That is, the place which actually works as a shining example of social democracy doesn’t have detailed planning and zoning laws and doesn’t allow single-interest fanatics to derail the building of a thriving modern economy.
Quite the opposite, in fact. In the time it took Ireland (and Ireland’s pretty good as a business jurisdiction goes) just to think about the planning permission, Denmark has the plant up and ready for the ribbon-cutting.
All of which is an interesting lesson for progressive liberalism. Sure, I don’t share the taste for equality and redistribution. But I will still insist that you’ve got to look at those places which do it, manage both the trick and to make it work. The trick is to recognize that you’ve got to be creating wealth and incomes to tax and redistribute before you can do that taxing and redistributing.
The more you want to have a redistributionist tax and benefits system, the more free market and noninterventionist you’ve got to leave that market red in tooth and claw which pays for it all. As the Nordics do. Denmark, Sweden, Norway — underneath their tax systems they’re more free market, more capitalist even, than the U.S., which is what makes them work.
Tim Worstall (@worstall) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a senior fellow at the Adam Smith Institute. You can read all his pieces at the Continental Telegraph.
