 Hello, and welcome to the second episode of Roman's Book Report. Today, we're going to talk about a short history of tractors in Ukrainian. This was particularly interesting to me because it's about Ukrainian immigrants and their children, and I am a child of Ukrainian immigrants, and here's the proof. I finished it about a year ago right before I left for Ukraine on a Fulbright scholarship. I'm back now, and I've been wanting to do this. It's a very funny book, and I want to read you the first paragraph to illustrate that. Ready? Two years after my mother died, my father fell in love with a glamorous blonde Ukrainian divorcee. He was 84, and she was 36. She exploded into our lives like a fluffy pink grenade, churning up the murky water, bringing to the surface a sludge of sloughed off memories, giving the family ghosts a kick up the backside. I enjoyed this book very much. It was very funny. I laughed out loud a few times. I liked the way it treated Ukrainian history as very conflicted. I liked the way the main character felt attention between socialism as in the horrors of the Soviet Union and socialism as in the really cool people at the university who call themselves socialist and look real cool and act smarter than everyone else or whatever. I might be attributing that detail or ascribing it. I liked that treatment when it was kind of on the fence, which is for most of the book, but then it sinks into complete economic illiteracy. By the end of it, I felt like the case was being made for socialism. It was being made in the last book I reviewed in Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent, but there it was very clear that the characters were fools. This is also from just the characters advocating it, but it was just presented a little too strongly and there was no counterweight to their beliefs. And I want to go over my objections. For example, here on page 221, it talks about and that there are two daughters in the story and both their parents are from Ukraine and they're remembering to one another how when they were little kids, a lady on the tram gave their mother a six pence. This takes place in Britain and it says, it was at that moment more than anything that happened to me afterwards that turned me into a lifelong socialist. So a lady on the bus giving her mom a coin turns her into a socialist. Well I don't think charity has anything to do with socialism. In fact I don't think it's a metaphor for socialism at all. I think socialism would be someone coming onto the bus, threatening everyone with a gun, taking their money by force or threat of force, giving a little bit of it to the poor lady and putting the rest in the pocket. I think that's socialism, not how it's portrayed here. Next one. Skip that. Okay, right here. This is a Ukrainian man talking. This is the wild west nature of capitalism. We are subjected to Nikolai Aleksandrovich said Dubov in his calm, intelligent type voice because all socialists are very intelligent as we all know. Those advisors who came from the west to show us how to build a capitalist economy, their model was the rapacious type of early American capitalism. Well as any student of American history knows, the early type of American capitalism was the most prosperous and also if you read an essay like the not so wild west, the most peaceful. Plus there's a whole slew of reasons what went wrong in Ukraine and I would say none of them have anything to do with capitalism in the private property sense of the term. Then these advisors will be seen for what they really are, truly robber barons who plunder our national assets and install American owned factories where our people will work for miserable wages, Russians, Germans, Americans, all of them. When they look at Ukraine, what do they see? Nothing but a source of cheap labor. Yes, she is greedy, predatory, outrageous, but she is a victim too, a source of cheap labor. So again and again there's that idiotic, thoroughly refuted idea that work is inherently exploitative. I'd say let people choose if they want to work or not. Any voluntary agreement makes the people richer. They don't need some super powerful government criminalizing employment. The old man in this story, the one who married that 36 year old blonde, he's working on a book called A Short History of Tractors and at the end towards the end they have a passage from his book. He's also economically illiterate. He writes, the dust bowl of the 1920s and the extreme hardship which stemmed from it led ultimately to the economic chaos which culminated in the collapse of the American stock exchange in 1929. The dust bowl caused the stock exchange to collapse in 1929. I would encourage this 84 year old character to read Murray Rothbard's History of the Great Depression or America's Great Depression. I have it right here on my shelf. I had a lot more to do with printing money and inflationary monetary policies than the dust bowl. Although he is 84 years old I can forgive that character. I could forgive any of these characters if they were just speaking from their own bias but I think the author is putting the force of truth behind their statements especially because all these socialist ones come towards the end kind of like revelations. Because of what I'm not sure it's kind of tangential to the plot but nevertheless there they are. Here's the one that I am the most sick of hearing. Personally, I would favor the Scandinavian model. Take the best from both capitalism and socialism. Don't you agree? Yes of course you can do that in, well whatever. So I am so sick of hearing about the glories of socialist Sweden that I did a bunch of research and I organized my notes and I want to spend the rest of this video blog refuting this notion of Sweden as some socialist paradise. First of all Sweden is not as rich as everybody thinks. Their own Institute of Trade did a very careful study of two decades over two decades about American purchasing power versus Swedish purchasing power throughout the 80s and for all of the 90s. And what they found was that the median household income in Sweden was equivalent to $26,800 while the American one $39,400. That is a huge difference. So Sweden is or at the end of the 90s was considerably poorer than the United States. Second of all Sweden is not as socialist as everyone thinks. In a society in which the majority of goods are produced at private initiative in pursuit of private profit is a capitalist society. A socialist society is one in which goods and services are produced at social or government initiative and in pursuit of some glorious vision that has nothing to do with the market or reality I would add. So the Soviet Union, Cuba, Venezuela are our societies where most stuff is produced or was produced at public initiative. So they're not socialist. And that little observation comes from George Reisman's wonderful essay Interventionism which along with my whole bunch of footnotes I'm going to post on my blog RomansBookReport.com Anyway Sweden is considered socialist because they have a very high income tax but what its advocates don't mention is that it has a considerably lower corporate tax. In the United States the corporate tax is $39.1 if you live in a place like Illinois or California and you have to pay a state corporate tax it's well into the 40s. So Sweden's corporate tax is $26.3. Furthermore Sweden is relatively free. The Heritage Foundation rates countries on their economic freedom. The United States is at 9 and dropping like a rock. Sweden is at 22 and rising. So of all the countries in the world the United States is ranked 9th in economic freedom. Sweden is ranked 22nd. Not that big a difference. So first reason Sweden is not as rich as everyone thinks. Third reason is that Sweden's welfare state that everyone thinks is so great. It came about in the 1950s and especially in the 60s. That was the rise of Sweden's welfare state. Virtually all major Swedish companies came into existence before the rise of the welfare state. You see Sweden used to be very very free. They haven't had a lot of money. They had a free banking system until 1903 in which different currencies could compete with one another. So like the people who think that Sweden the wealth that it has is because of peace and because of the freedom that it used to have. One study which was published in the Swedish Economic Association of Sweden I don't know if I'm saying that correctly. But one study found that since the rise of their welfare state, in other words for the whole second half of the 20th century, there was zero zero private sector job creation in Sweden. So one study found that since the rise of their welfare state in other words for the whole second half of the 20th century there was zero zero private sector job creation in Sweden. Ladies like Marina Luka, Luka. She's a good writer and it was an enjoyable read. But that economic stuff just grated on me. And even if you don't believe any of these arguments about Sweden, even if you think they're all wrong, you have to ask yourself if Sweden is such a socialist paradise, why are they electing politicians who describe themselves as conservative? Sweden's current prime minister, Fredrik Rheinfeld, is a conservative. He calls himself a conservative and a few years back, in the middle of an economic crisis, he cut taxes on everybody including the super rich and now that's widely attributed to the sort of upswing that Sweden has seen job creation. They seem to be coming out of their hard times. So that's it. Good book, bad economics. Slava Ukraini.