Sweden's ruling alliance said on Tuesday it planned to invest 482 billion Swedish Krona ($66.8 billion) over the coming 11 years in infrastructure projects.
The government, which faces a general election in September, said 417 billion of the spending would come from central government finances with the remainder from the European Union and local government coffers.
Isn’t this interesting? They already have a deficit and sky-high debts, but that’s not enough, they need to steal more money from the private sector to build their monuments to a higher price and with lower efficiency than the alternative. This is true socialist planning and if you ever wanted confirmation that the current Swedish government loath capitalism, this is it.
Don’t get me wrong, if they necessarily need to waste money, infrastructure is one of the least wasteful projects. It helps trade along, communication gets better and you often get a good trickledown effect. I prefer this before departments doing whatnot and their usual projects, but that’s not what this is about. They are not going to take the money from existing income, oh no, this will be borrowed and printed money together with the extra income they get from fees paid from traffic cameras and road tolls.
But the worst thing about this is of course government incompetence. As shown from history and previous similar ‘investments’ millions will disappear in departments, millions more will be wasted on meetings, expropriation of private property and wrong decisions.
If we instead let the market buy all roads and infrastructure that income could be used to pay of the public debt and the maintenance and investments of our infrastructure would come with a fraction of the price.
No comments:
Post a Comment