Remember The Good Times

It's election time in Norway. And not a word until this weekend about it. Once again, we had almost a year coverage of the US election but only one weekend of Norway. Even worse is that we even have an election to the Swedish Church and not a single word ONE WEEK before it happens. Of course I don't like the church in general, but when I'm still a member I should probably vote in the election. At least to keep the politicians away from a religious institution. As I've said before religion and politics should not pair up, so I have to take my responsibility to secure that. Otherwise we will have some really questionable parties governing these bodies. Come on, what in god's name are the left doing there as they don't even believe that religion should have a place in society? It's screwed up I tell you.

Oh, fun thing. In most news sites in Sweden you can comment on articles and on one special site where almost anyone can write an article about any subject, Newsmill. Of course the comments usually evolve to hate/love discussion. The most infected discussion is the so-called "immigration problem". With this I mean anything that remotely can be blamed on immigrants. An unknown kid throws a stone at someone? "Out with the immigrants". Israel vs Palestinians, "Out with the immigrants". The tax is to high? "Out with the immigrants". You get the picture. Often these remarks talk about mass-immigration and we can't handle it. Fair, immigration was 100 000 last year of a population on 9 million (Red=Immigration, Blue=Emigration). But I believe our society can handle it, if the process of immigration is shaped up and of course, not taking in immigrants will just postpone the problem and slow the economic. The Swedes can't even reproduce them self with just 1,91% in fertility rate (close to the desired 2,1%, but close don't shoot the hare). At the moment the Swedish growth rate is 0,82% so we are not that bad of, but that's due to immigration. And our economy is based on a constant growth of the population to keep working and keep the older population sustained with welfare services.

So now to the fun part (took me long enough). Of course I couldn't resist to put that fact up at one place one evening, slept thru the night and voila, next day a comment to my comment had appeared. The commentator declared me a tomfoolery liberal with standard phrases who don't understand the real world or something like that (can't say I do, but who is he to judge anyway?). I more or less expected such such an answer, but then he writes that we had it much better when we were 7 million compared to 9 millions today. So I checked it out just for fun. We reached 7 million 1950. Let's see now, 1950, Cold war, Life expectancy laid around 70 years compared to around 80 years today, Inflation was above 15% compared to just above zero today, the GDP per capita has skyrocketed since the 1950's, no TV's and many other modern commodities that we have today, so according to me, we have it much better today, but some just don't want to see it. Although it is a huge stretch from what he said, but he said that we had it better then so I couldn't resist to check out how "good" we had it back then. Of course, being born in 1987 I can't possible remember that, so if I'm analyzing this right, this person must at least be over 60 years old, born earliest 1946 to have some memory of those time and that wouldn't surprise me, but my guess is that this person was born much later and have this idolized version of the 50's in his head that his parents fed him (my stereotype of old people is that they believe "that everything was better in the old days") that he himself never experienced. I could of course be wrong, but another stereotype I have is that seniors probably don't spend to much time on the internet (some probably do, but hey, I have my stereotypes and other people have others) debating politics like that. Just my opinion.

Of course I never answered the question, mostly because I was amused by the tomfoolery liberal comment and his huge misunderstanding of economic theory. And of course like this I can be an arrogant idiot sitting on my high horses looking down on the uneducated masses I more or less despise as the social liberal I am without being questioned. Anonymous on the web is fun.