RSS
TOP NAV
BOOK
BLOGS 12
BLOGS 11
BLOGS 10
BLOGS 09
BLOGS 08
BLOGS 07
BLOGS 06
BLOGS 05
BLOGS 04
| The Devout American Who Wrote "The Path to 9/11" | B-XVI Regensburg: Who Has the Problem? |
Compassionate Conservatives Win in Sweden
by Christopher Chantrill
September 19, 2006 at 4:36 am
HERE IN THE United States President Bush’s “compassionate conservatism” has disappeared in a hurricane of Bush hatred.
But in Britain Conservative Party leader David Cameron has given new life to the Tories with an emphasis on green, windmills, and work/life balance.
Now the Moderate Party in Sweden, led by Frederick Reinfeldt, has romped home to an election win in the world capital of the welfare state with a program that promises not to change too much too fast.
Yes, but what will Reinfeldt actually do? CNN has a run down. The main issue was the Swedish welfare system.
While insisting that he has no intention of dismantling the system, which is something of a sacred cow in Sweden, Reinfeldt has argued that, if the country is to compete economically, urgent reforms are needed.
What reforms? Well, a tax cut, for a start, “a reduction in unemployment benefit from 80 percent of previous income to 65 percent,” but above all a determination to “change things through safe steps.”
Lefties like Polly Toynbee in Britain can see the writing on the wall.
What an irony that the victors - 41-year-old Fredrik Reinfeldt's New Moderates - modelled themselves on New Labour...
Here's the other great lesson from Sweden. They forgot about women - yes, even in Sweden. New Labour has won the past three elections only on the strength of women's votes - yet Labour too has forgotten the importance of connecting with them...
But in opposition look how Cameron's campaign is devoted to pleasing women, in tone, style, words and demeanour: the polls tell him women are more green, family-minded and worried about work-life balance.
And the thing is, Cameron’s mood music is having an effect. The swing to the Tories is 6 percent among women but only 2 percent among men.
The last, brief rightwing government in Sweden left heavy footprints. It cut the welfare state and damaged education by bringing in private schools[.]
Oh yes, did you know? In Sweden they have school vouchers. You can send your child to the school of your choice. What a radical, woman-friendly concept! But safe, you understand, very safe.
Sphere: Related Content |Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.
What Liberals Think About Conservatives
[W]hen I asked a liberal longtime editor I know with a mainstream [publishing] house for a candid, shorthand version of the assumptions she and her colleagues make about conservatives, she didn't hesitate. “Racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-choice fascists,” she offered, smiling but meaning it.
Harry Stein, I Can't Believe I'm Sitting Next to a Republican
US Life in 1842
Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism
Society and State
For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008
Socialism equals Animism
Imagining that all order is the result of design, socialists
conclude that order must be improvable by better design of some superior mind.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit
Sacrifice
[Every] sacrifice is an act of impurity that pays for a prior act of greater impurity... without its participants having to suffer the full consequences incurred by its predecessor. The punishment is commuted in a process that strangely combines and finesses the deep contradiction between justice and mercy.
Frederick Turner, Beauty: The Value of Values
Religion, Property, and Family
But the only religions that have survived are those which support property and the family.
Thus the outlook for communism, which is both anti-property and anti-family, (and also anti-religion), is not promising.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit
Racial Discrimination
[T]he way “to achieve a system of determining admission to the public schools on a nonracial basis,”
Brown II, 349 U. S., at 300–301, is to stop assigning students on a racial basis. The way to stop
discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.
Roberts, C.J., Parents Involved in Community Schools vs. Seattle School District
Postmodernism
A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy
Physics, Religion, and Psychology
Paul Dirac: “When I was talking with Lemaître about [the expanding universe] and feeling stimulated
by the grandeur of the picture that he has given us, I told him that
I thought cosmology was the branch of science that lies closest to religion.
However [Georges] Lemaître [Catholic priest, physicist, and
inventor of the Big Bang Theory] did not agree with me. After thinking it over he
suggested psychology as lying closest to religion.”
John Farrell, “The Creation Myth”
Pentecostalism
Within Pentecostalism the injurious hierarchies of the wider world are abrogated and replaced by a single hierarchy of faith, grace, and the empowerments of the spirit... where groups gather on rafts to take them through the turbulence of the great journey from extensive rural networks to the mega-city and the nuclear family...
David Martin, On Secularization
Never Trust Experts
No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.
Lord Salisbury, “Letter to Lord Lytton”
Mutual Aid
In 1911... at least nine million of the 12 million covered by national insurance were already members of voluntary sick pay schemes. A similar proportion were also eligible for medical care.
Green, Reinventing Civil Society
mysql close 0