17:14 - ON THE GOVERNMENT: 

I explain why the Swedish government is only moderately funky at Cato@liberty.

12:27 - ARE 47 MILLION AMERICANS UNINSURED?: 

Since Hillary Clinton relaunched her plans for mandatory health coverage most newspapers repeat the claim that 47 million Americans lack health insurance. But I have yet to read a single paper that mentions that 45 percent of those are uninsured for less than four months (because they are between jobs and therefore between health insurances).

When we look closer at the uninsured there are other problems with the idea of a gigantic, permanent health care underclass in America: 8.3 million of the uninsured make between $50,000 and $74,999 a year and another 8.7 million make more than $75,000 a year. And about half of the low-income households without an insurance are eligible for a public health insurance, but have chosen not to enrol. Almost 10 million of the uninsured are not American citizens, and almost the whole increase in the number of uninsured since 1990 is a result of growing immigration.

One leftist leaning foundation estimates that the real number of chronically uninsured (those uninsured for two years or more) is 8.2 million. That´s still a lot of people. But it´s not 47 million.

02:17 - NOZICK NEVER STOPPED: 

Via Mattias Svensson I learn that the political scientist Leif Lewin is using the old we-don´t-have-to-take-libertarianism-seriously-because-Robert-Nozick-himself-abandoned-it argument on DN Debatt. People who haven´t studied Nozick often does. But this is what Nozick himself said on the subject in the last interview:

JS: In The Examined Life, you reported that you had come to see the libertarian position that you´d advanced in Anarchy, State and Utopia as "seriously inadequate." But there are several places in Invariances where you seem to suggest that you consider the view advanced there, broadly speaking, at least, a libertarian one. Would you now, again, self-apply the L-word?

RN: Yes. But I never stopped self-applying. What I was really saying in The Examined Life was that I was no longer as hardcore a libertarian as I had been before. But the rumors of my deviation (or apostasy!) from libertarianism were much exaggerated.

01:54 - 33% OF ALL MEN ARE EVIL: 

Sure, I devote most space on this blog to attack oppression, statism and protectionism, but just for the record, this is almost worse.

22:58 - DO YOU REALLY WANT CLIENTS LIKE THAT?: 

"Our sales reps have a problem, however. New clients usually ask: ‘Hey, where is John Galt? How come I’m not important enough to rate a visit from John Galt?’"

- Chief executive Annemarie Omrod tells New York Times about the difficulty of having a software company called John Galt Solutions.

14:31 - AND I THOUGHT MY TEACHERS WERE BIASED: 

One Belarussian student that I met recently explains that in the Belarussian State University one professor Bainev teaches his third year students that the Russian race is superior, western people are animals, the market economy is evil and the Soviet Union was wonderful and should be resurrected under a strong leader who controls everybody´s lives.

And that is the lectures on "Economic of enterprise" in the economics faculty...

08:25 - THE END OF AL-QAEDA?: 

Apparently, European Muslim groups are preparing a fatwa against Iraqi al-Qaeda´s threats to kill Lars Vilks. This threat begins to look like a desperate attempt from an increasingly unpopular group to get back into the spotlight. In Iraq, Sunni Muslims have started to fight al-Qaeda in Anbar province because they beheaded children and killed people for minor offences like smoking.

And Pew´s surveys (pdf) show the same growing hostility in Muslim countries. The proportion who have a lot of confidence in bin Laden to do the right thing has been reduced 2003-2007 from 38 to 2 percent in Jordan, from 19 to 3 percent in Indonesia and from 7 to 1 percent in Turkey. The proportion of Muslims who think that suicide bombing might be justified has declined by half or more.

Totalitarian terrorists can be popular as long as they only attack a common adversary. As soon as they begin to expose Muslim countries to the same terror the limited appeal of death and destruction becomes obvious.

16:00 - CORRECT CORRECTION: 

If Swedish newspapers bother to correct a mistake they often call it "Clarification" rather than "Correction" and pretend that they were right but got the wording wrong. They obviously think that their credibility is threatened if they admit mistakes. What a quality newspaper does can be seen in last week´s The Economist. After having explained that they gave an American 18th century politician the wrong title, they conclude:

"We apologise for a stupid blunder."

11:34 - DAN BÄCKMAN HADE INTE GJORT DET BÄTTRE: 

Om du intresserar dig för genren pekoral får du inte missa Björn Ranelid ca 31 minuter in i andra timmen av dagens Godmorgon, världen! Ranelid har nämligen ödslat dyrbart bokhandelsutrymme på att angripa presidenten som bara en mor kan älska. Mot allt dåligt, för allt bra, ungefär.

Eller tja, angripa och angripa, Ranelid "låter [Bush] sitta surrad i ett amerikanskt lasso", "jag binder honom vid ordet" och tvingar honom att "resa mellan ögat och hjärtat" "en bit ifrån därifrån där jag har min äppellund i Kivik". Osv. Ni fattar.

18:10 - STINGY TERRORISTS: 

"The price is a little low, what do you get for $100,000 today?"

- The Swedish artist Lars Vilks shows that he has a sense of humour, unlike Al-Qaeda in Iraq which has put a price on his head because of his Mohammed caricature (so far no Christian group has threatened to kill Vilks for his "Jesus as an elephant").

11:24 - 3 MILLION LIVES SAVED ANNUALLY: 

UNICEF reports that for the first time in modern history the number of children dying before the age of five is lower than 10 million.

That is 10 million too many, but at least it´s not 13 million too many, as it was in 1990.

23:49 - KREMLINOLOGY: 

Now I have presented the Russian translation of In Defence of Global Capitalism in Moscow for both economy students, young liberals and globalisation critics who find their alternative ideals in Lenin and Che Guevara, but also in Iran and among Serbian war criminals.

But of course, if Russians only found dictators and authoritarians on posters on the walls of anti-globalisation bookstores, they would be lucky. This week, after the Russian military announced the successful test of the world´s most powerful non-nuclear bomb, Putin picked another old friend, Viktor Zubkov, as new prime minister. When I ask Russians about it, they have three different theories:

1) This is just a way to win time before Putin announces his successor as president (probably Ivanov).

2) Zubkov will become the new president on paper, but Putin will maintain control behind the scenes.

3) Zubkov will become the new president, but soon he will face a crisis and leave, and Putin "has to" step in to maintain stability.  

But their real response is "who cares?" No matter whose face will be on television, Putin and the siloviki will stay in power.

(By the way, did you read this? Necessary reading if you want to understand Russia today.)

15:06 - POSITIVE STRESS: 

"We joke that as long as all these disputes are going on, [politicians] don´t have time to interfere in business."

- The Ukrainian businessman Taras Kutovyy explains why the Ukranian economy is booming, despite political chaos.

09:55 - IN UKRAINE: 

I have travelled to Ukraine to discuss liberalism and capitalism with students. I have only been here a day now but already I have a sense of how far the country´s democratic development has gone: People here say that all Ukrainian politicians are crooks.

A country where people feel free to say that has come a very long way.

09:04 - FÖRBUDSLIBERALISM: 

Och i dag kom Jan Björklunds första utspel som nästan-partliledare. Precis vad Sverige behövde: Ett nytt förbud.

10:57 - IT´S NOT ABOUT RELIGIOUS FREEDOM, STUPID: 

Lilla Torg Liberalerna wonder why I don´t write about the Swedish artist Lars Vilks and Iran´s and Pakistan´s demands that Sweden should punish him for his drawing of Muhammed as a roundabout dog. (This is what makes this sad story hilarious: How do you explain the concept of a roundabout dog for the Mullahs?)

One reason is that I rarely write about things where most people already say the right things. It´s fairly obvious that the day we accept Iran´s standards for what you can and cannot say we´ll end up like...well, Iran. And for them, it´s not really about Muhammed - you can buy images of him in the streets of Teheran if you wish. It´s just about diverting dissatisfaction from their own sick government.

But one thing needs to be said: A lot of people describe Vilks´ attempt to make fun of religion and people who want to ban his drawings as a conflict between free speech and religious freedom, even journalists and some people who defend free speech. That is a total misunderstanding of the concept of religious freedom. Having the freedom to believe in whatever you want does not include a right to dictate what others think and say about those beliefs, just like free speech does not include the right to dictate what others print and say, and the freedom to vote does not include the right to force others to vote for the same party. In the western, liberal tradition, freedom is a "negative right" - it protects you from coercion from others, it does not give you the right to coerce others. Those who want to punish Vilks are opponents of religious freedom.

Whenever a journalist call this a conflict between those who believe in free spech and those who believe in religious freedom Iran has won a tiny victory.

By  the way, here is Vilks´ Jesus as an elephant.

15:02 - I POD: 

In Timbro´s series of podcasts, I have now produced one. For almost an hour I talk (in Swedish) about happiness, what it is, how we can attain it and how some politicians try to steal it. I also talk about the moment when I discovered that I was happy, and play the music that increase my wellbeing.

You can listan to it or download it here.

00:02 - HOW MANY COMMISSIONERS DOES IT TAKE TO CHANGE A LIGHTBULB?: 

Did you think that was an absurd example of protectionism? Wait til you hear this:

The European Commission, which talks about how important it is that we switch to energy-saving bulbs, has just decided to continue to make them too expensive for European consumers by extending the 66 percent tariff against energy-saving bulbs from China another year. In the end, monopoly profits for Osram was more important for the Commission than the planet, the consumers and free trade.

23:38 - SAVING THE FAMILY FARM: 

So what is this? A guide to all the Starbucks cafés in Manhattan?

No, nothing that nice. It´s a subsidy map from the Corner. The red dots are people who live in Manhattan but receive agricultural subsidies. So apparently they can afford it and apparently their work doesn´t force them to stay too close to the farm. The big red dots are people who get more than a quarter of a million dollars in federal subsidies annually.

The House Democrats just stopped the Bush Administration´s plan to reduce the income threshold to $200,000 a year. I guess their argument is that it would hurt hard working sommeliers at fancy Manhattan restaurants.

(Thanks Tino)

14:02 - MISSA INTE: 

Mattias Svensson om Göran Rosenberg, intelligent design, ointelligenta artiklar och världens roligaste halv-syftningsfel.

02:19 - ANOTHER COFFEE, MR PUTNAM?: 

Speaking of statistics, if you want to explain the difference between correlation and causation to someone, here is a fascinating example from NationMaster:

The five countries with the highest coffee consumption are Norway, Finland, Denmark, Sweden and the Netherlands. And all that coffee must make us trust our fellow man, because the countries with the highest levels of trust are ... yes, Norway, Finland, Denmark, Sweden and the Netherlands...

11:32 - IGNORANCE AND VEILS OF IGNORANCE: 

At least one angry blogger "depises" me for using the statistics ("lies") in the last post. He (and some friendly people who emailed me) point out that one of the poverty measurses actually results in an increase in the absolute number of poor in India. They are right. According to the World Bank (pdf), extreme poverty in India was reduced from 51.75 to 34.33 percent 1981-2004. But since the population grew rapidly, the number increased by 7 million people.

Does that mean that poverty actually increased in India, as the angry blogger would have it? No. If we were to say yes, we would have to accept that a country with a 1.1 percent poverty rate and 100 million inhabitants has more poverty than a country with a 100 percent poverty rate and 1 million inhabitants, and that a country with 1.1 percent unemployment and 100 million inhabitants has more unemployment than a country with 100 percent unemployment and 1 million inhabitants. If a country reduced unemployment from 10 to 5 percent, you would say that unemployment grew if the population size more than doubled at the same time. (And obviously, you would say that Bangladesh is richer than Sweden, because you would not measure wealth per capita, but only the total number).

Of course in a literal sense the first country has more people who are unemployed, but no one would say that this country has higher unemployment. But some people do this when they talk of poverty, because they want to deny the progress that is made worldwide.

I think Björn Lomborg was right when he used John Rawls´ "veil of ignorance" to think of development. Imagine that you must choose which society you were to live in, without knowing anything about your position in that society. Then it is obvious that you would prefer the country with the lowest rate of unemployment or poverty and the highest GDP per capita, because that is what says something about what the average life is like in that society, and not just about the size of the population in that society.

The poverty rate is a measure of poverty, the poverty number is a measure of population size. I am also sad that India has not made even bigger progress (it´s not big enough, it´s just the biggest ever) but those who lament the fact that the number of poor grew by 7 million 1981-2004 do not lament the fact that Indian poverty grew, but the fact that the Indian population grew.

00:02 - THEY MAKE IT UP AS THEY GO ALONG: 

I missed it, but Olle emails me about how Kulturnytt in Swedish public service radio celebrated India´s 60th anniversary. They did it by saying that "poverty has hardly been reduced" as India has been modernised and globalised.

That´s how you ruin someone´s birthday out of a lack of statistics. if we use the offical Indian poverty rate as measured by the Indian Planning Commission poverty has been reduced from 51.3 to 27.5 percent between 1977/78 and 2004/05.

If we prefer the World Bank´s strict definition of extreme poverty (I do), it has been reduced from almost 60 to 40 percent in rural areas and from almost 30 to 20 percent in urban areas, between 1981 and 2004.

14:01 - TOY SOLDIERS: 

Do you want to get a sense of the current American debate about trade? All you need is KAL´s cartoon in The Economist this week:

Bush: "I understand Russia is making plans to expand its military airpower..."

Adviser 1: "Yes, Mr President. We are preparing for a worst case scenario."

Adviser 2: "Russian bombers dropping Chinese toys."

10:03 - ORGANISERA INTE IHJÄL OSS, SNÄLLA: 

"Hej kamrater, några rader om varför vi inte vill skriva på ert kollektivavtal.

 Vi tror att vi är bäst på att sköta vårt företag, under 45 år har det drivits utan kollektivavtal. Vi har löst våra konflikter utan större problem. Under den tiden har fackföreningsrörelse och arbetsgivareorganisationer många gånger misslyckats med sin uppgift. Det har kostat enskilda och samhället massor med pengar."

- En anonym företagare vädjar till facket att använda argument i stället för tvångsåtgärder. Läs hela på Fredrick Federleys blogg.

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