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Small government wins another election in Europe

Keynesianism is still dead in Europe

By: Soren Dayton (Diary)  |  March 7th, 2011 at 12:05 PM  | 

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Forgive me for being a broken record on this, but the right has won yet another election in Europe, this time in Estonia. Last June, I wrote that Keynesianism is dead in Europe as a political force. This weekend, the Estonian right has won another election fought over government spending. The coalition of the right went from 44% of the vote in the last parliamentary election in 2007 to over 50% in this one. The New York Times made it very clear that the left’s attack on the government was that it cut too deeply.

The vote reflects approval for a government that continued to embrace laissez-faire capitalism during the painful months after the global downturn. After Estonia’s economy shrank nearly 15 percent, the state reduced its budget by the equivalent of 9 percent of gross domestic product. Demand fell steeply, and unemployment crept up, early in 2010, to 19.8 percent. [...]

Meanwhile, the economy has been projected to grow by 4 percent this year, and unemployment has dropped to around 10 percent, according to the Estonian Unemployment Insurance Fund.

The opposition leader Edgar Savisaar, the mayor of the capital, Tallinn, and head of the Center Party, argued during the campaign that the government had overlooked the suffering of average people in its drive to join the euro zone.

Just to reiterate this now-tired fact: Keynesianism is dead as a political force in Europe. Small government and economic liberty has been winning elections throughout the continent.

We need to learn the lesson here.

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  • twenty5psi

    Western Europe still has a ways to go, hopefully Greece and soon enough Spain /Portugal will be a wake up call.

    • http://redmeatconservative.blogspot.com/ dhorowitz3

      yeah, it is interesting how all of the former states that suffered under communism are eager to embrace capitalism. The Czech Republic has a robust conservative movement.

      • twenty5psi

        Eastern Europe may be less developed overall but they will reap the rewards of limited gov’t soon enough.

        • http://www.liberallyconservative.com Liberally Conservative

          It’s truly amazing to watch Old and New Europe embrace free market capitalism while we witness the destruction of the country who demonstrated to the world how it’s all done under the banner of freedom and individuality.

          I too, from the school of Milton Friedman, thought Maynard Keynes was dead but alas – he is plugged in to life support in the United States.

          It’s up to us to continue the fight to unplug Keynes and his ilk in the Beltway.

          P.S. We need to unplug Karl Marx and Saul Alinsky also.

  • drfredc

    Small government isn’t necessarily the end all solution to social and fiscal ills. The reality is ‘big government’ also include a big top down social marketplace (SOMP) for all sorts of social needs. Small government solutions need to provide a smooth evolutionary pathway from the various politically dominated government run social marketplaces to social marketplaces that reward individual and familial responsibility over politicians buying votes with handouts funded with money borrowed from future generations…

    Small government without dynamic individually driven SOMPs taking over from government run SOMPs are going to be short lived, failed experiments.

    • eburkedisciple

      called the CHURCH (for one at least). If we support the work of the church in meeting the physical and emotional/spiritual needs of the people we keep the work centered both close to the people and on the people.

  • graemephillips

    I’m delighted for the Estonians that after several years of economic reform, particularly the sometimes painful changes that resulted from the collapse of the communist system, they are poised to reap the fruits. It is such a shame that George W. Bush spent his 8 years in power frittering away the fruits of the reforms during the Reagan years and the boom of the Clinton years, all the while claiming to be a fiscal conservative. Hopefully Obamacare will constrain healthcare costs in the long-term, but it’s still too early to say. Perhaps the Republican party should contribute a solution rather than being the party of no, after having messed up the economy during the Bush years.

    • gaudium

      So much crap, from one person! Looks like you get your information from Saturday night live.

      • dwain

        gaudium You are so right!!!

    • http://www.hakubi.us/ Neil Stevens

      That’ll do it.

  • cam1

    should know better than anyone that communism/socialism doesn’t work. Hooray for them. I wonder if it will catch on here?

  • methodius

    in the 1990′s and seeing firsthand the devestation decades of Communism wreaked upon the landscape and upon the psyche of the people it is good to see what is rising from the ashes of that horrid, dehumanising system. As for us, we should learn from history rather than arrogantly assuming we can beat it. The leftists in this country simply think that we can succeed where others have utterly failed. It’s a fool’s errand.

    • eburkedisciple

      and Amen!

  • lgbpop

    The American Democrat by James F. Cooper. It’s a veritable feast of clarity, and yet a sobering account of what the Framers really intended – that individual liberty and political fairness were not attained by political participation by the majority of all people, but a majority of those successful enough to appreciate what liberty and enlightened self-rule actually were. It appears that the downward trend in American political probity wasn’t started by the Progressives in the 1890s, but by the anti-Federalists and Democratic Republicans in the 1820s. Every move made since then to include more people than the Constitution originally intended – non-property owners, for example – actually opened up our system to ever greater abuse by politicians pandering to the factions newly allowed to participate. Cooper’s thesis seems to be that when the majority of voters becomes made up of those who haven’t contributed materially to America’s success by owning a stake in it, they will realize they are strong enough in numbers to take what they want from those who have created it.

    Before I forget – his full name is James Fenimore Cooper, and the book was published in 1835. Then as now, a man who appreciated the full import of the Constitution was vilified by his fellow citizens as an aristocrat just for pointing out the truth. Witness what’s transpiring now in Wisconsin, Indiana and Ohio and it’s as if Cooper could see into the future.

    Khrushchev was right, when he said The Soviet Union would triumph over the USA if only it could last long enough, for we were the agents of our own destruction.

  • http://ja-js.blogtownhall.com RME KRNL

    “The New York Times made it very clear that the left?s attack on the government was that it cut too deeply.”

    The Left, anywhere and any time, always sees any cuts as too deep. What’s new?