Couple o' pints later..

 

Maybe the bottom line I'm trying to nail here is about individual happiness. I got a bit curious on the subject since I always felt my personal chances for happiness are not the slightest hindered by the fact that our government is traditionally a lightyear left of what you guys have over in States. Always thought of myself as pro-gun, pro-national defence and pro-individual freedom and yet find myself being a leftist in your standards.

 

Agreed, we in North Europe are a pretty homogenous folk. We don't have huge social and ethnic varieties like the rest of so called West. Just roots that go few millenia deep. Those roots help us stay on track even if our political alignment was too far left or too far right. My opinion only - many here disagree.

 

Economical wealth is relative as is happiness that stems from it. All my countrymen are taxed on equal terms which means my neighbour has to work equally hard to make it big. Since I don't live next door to people with tax-related privileges the taxation really doesn't bug me at all. I'm not familiar with all the taxation related terminology but our income tax is zero with very little income after which the progression takes roughly 15% of 25000?/year, 33% for 48000?/year, 37% of 60000?/year... you get the picture.  VAT is 22%, corporate profit is taxed for 28% (it's around there, don't bother to check it right now since my fingers are on fire). Price for a gallon of gas is roughly 7,5 dollars. 1,35 euros for 1 liter.

 

So the wealth around me defines the actual happiness about the money I make. That is, if I'm not a too enlightened individual. Which I'm not, though I try. What other freedoms should be there that I feel left out of? Gun ownership? It was a big thing for me in my teens and I did manage to put together a tiny armory, semi-autos included. Do I need them now? No. But I'm not willing to sell them either.  They became too close to me back then and selling them just feels wrong. Never sell things you used to sleep next to. I definetly don't want to keep them in my home since that would, if revealed, make my home a thousand times more likely target for burglars. I feel much safer with them locked up far away from me.

 

Entrepeneurship here is well supported if you happen to be an engineer or a software developer. Technical innovations are very well supported by public funds from seed phase up, right to where the venture capital starts to stick. But technical innovations only. They can be measured, they can be understood.

 

To me, that's the big hindrance and the worst thing in Finnish society. Lack of vision, lack of risk takers, lack of smarts in marketing. Biggest thing here that puts boundaries on our freedom is not anything the government does: It's the way we never risk face. Failure in family, business or work is humiliating. Not quite in the way it is to the Japanese, but close. It's the culture of avoiding shame 'till you die that takes the best edge of most of us.

Did I actually have a point someplace? Never! Just that as long as I live well, eat well, and am pretty much allowed to do whatever I want that doesn't hurt others, happiness is a subjective experience. Do I miss the right for open carry I never had? No. Do I cry for lower taxes as long as my friends don't get them either? No. I'm quite certain that Americans could give up masses of things they now take for granted and still stay perfectly happy. You could take away all the guns, leaving only bolt-action rifles and double-barrelled shotguns to the sportsmen&hunters, and Americans would be just fine. You guys would be annoyed to death by a government that did something like that, but your kids and grandkids wouldn't have it any other way.

 

So it's not about left, right, liberal, conservative. It's about what you get used to, what your subjective standards are. As long as you're granted safety, opportunities and freedom, it really doesn't matter that much.  End of gospel.

 

G'night!

 

Mikko

Joe was indeed right....   Now the commies are in office

Your wrong, the commies have been in the office since Woodrow Wilson. Back then it was the progressives, then came the new deal, the great society and the third way. Now they don't need to hide who they are, because socalism is gaining more support in this country, and the far left of the democratic party is just as red as any other socalist party in history.

I believe that it is characteristic of Communists in free Western societies to mask themselves as anything else. Given the history of Communism and of its murder of over a hundred million innocents in the last 9 decades the necessity for this is clear.

 

We have a whole galaxy of causes in this country. There are feminists, pro-lifers, animal rightsers, environmentalists, labor activists, so-called civil rights people, gun control advocates, assisted suicide activists, anti-war types, etc. It probably doesn't surprise people that these groups are as uniform in their political ideologies as they are since we are so used to these people. But they are surprisingly uniform in their political ideologies.

 

A lot of causes start out as totally honest and focused on some perceived concern. Back in the seventies, at least when I was aware of this, energy conservation was to a large extent motivated by a desire to be more self-sufficient and less dependent on utilities companies over which one didn't have any control. Environmentalism was based on a natural desire to live better.

 

Now, both these are merged into a movement which is advancing to a clearly statist political agenda.

 

What happens, I believe, is that Communists move in and hijack honestly motivated and mostly apolitical causes so that they can exploit the issues and people for the purpose of destroying private enterprise and for destroying individual freedom of the people.

 

(Even Christian denominations are not immune. Athiest professors have gotten into seminaries and unbelieving clergy have gotten into churches. One result is the spread of the acceptance of openly homosexual clergy in some denominations. A more serious result is the flight of the population from churches in general.

 

The pattern here is pretty standard. A small clique of leftists work their way into positions of control in these denominations from which they impose their will on the membership - classic top-down revolution (like Hitler) methodology.)

 

So, we have progressives and we have Communists. Often they are the same these days because even though the Soviet Union and East Block fell, Communism is alive and well and promoting global warming hysteria.

 

It's dangerous to go around throwing out labels but Obama's reported associations with Rev. Wright, Frank Marshall Davis, Rashid Khalidi, William Ayres and others along with the Van Jones' and Anita Dunn's bloopering tends to make him look that way.

 

Obama's being a Communist probably would pass the duck test anyway.

 

With the left now dominating many of the church denominations, dominating education, the media, probably most labor unions as well as government, there can be no remaining roll for "progressives" since leftists are only pro-reform when reform serves to advance its political agenda. So any new progressive movements will be unwelcome.

 

Notice how "reform" minded Obama was reluctant to say anything about election fraud in Iran while reported election fraud in Afghanistan is a convenient excuse to limit our military commitment there (Obama, a political ally of Mayor Daley, was "shocked!, shocked!" to hear that there could be corruption in the Muslim World.).