Ancient Athens, Rome, the Renaissance…
“What sets these golden ages apart,” says Johan Norberg “is that … they managed to give more people more freedoms.”
In this extended interview we discuss how that allowed them to prosper, but also what led to their decline. Norberg is a Swedish author and historian, noted for his defense of capitalism. He’s interviewed here by John Stossel.
John Stossel says lots of people hate capitalism and would instead prefer socialism. Their reason: capitalism hurts the poor.
Not true, says Swedish historian and author Johan Norberg, who explains how capitalism actually saves lives and why socialism always fails. Norberg also dispels the myth that Sweden is a socialist success.
Though Sweden is more free market than America, Norberg says capitalism offers many more benefits and even makes people less lonely, more generous and less racist. More with Stossel and Norberg.
John Stossel says activists have a new goal: “Degrowth.” They say growth is killing us and they couldn’t be more wrong,” Stossel says.
Stossel welcomes author Johan Norberg, who says, “Growth is not killing us. It’s saving us!” Norberg explains that growth is essential to human progress, especially for poor people. More with Norberg and Stossell.
World leaders talk about their admiration for dictatorships, but historian Johan Norberg says it’s a utopian dream. “They think: “if someone at the top could point us in a certain direction, everything would go well.”
Norberg tells John Stossel that government, in fact, is big enough to give you anything and also big enough to take everything away from you. Here’s more.
The general consensus anywhere on the planet these days is that 2020 ranks as one of the worst years on record. Not only were we consumed with the COVID-19 pandemic, but also a strong economic downturn, political divisiveness like we’ve never witnessed and scandal after scandal.
On the flip side, historian Johan Norberg, author of The Story of Human Progress, says we’ve never had a better year and points out that people don’t realize that life keeps getting better. And he doubles down and says, “If I were to pick a year, the best year in human history to face a pandemic, I would say it’s 2020.”
Facing such a threat, say in 2005, would have been bad news, since we didn’t have the technology to create the vaccines we now have. In the 1990s, we didn’t have the worldwide web and in the 1970s we had no way to read the genome of the virus. Forget the 1950s, we wouldn’t have had a single ventilator.
In addition, Norberg says, the world has become a lot wealthier. “If you look at specifics like global poverty, child mortality, chronic undernourishment and illiteracy, they all declined faster than ever.” He elaborates further on our prosperity in the following interview with John Stossel.
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Democratic socialists, such as a large swath of the radical Democrat Party, like to single out Sweden as a socialist success, a model for all nations to follow. Not so fast, says Swedish historian Johan Norberg. “Sweden is not socialist.” He says that Sweden’s experimented with a system that resembled socialism in the 1970s and 1980s that failed miserably. “Big government taxed and spent heavily,” he says. “It was a period in Swedish history when our economy was going south.” At that point the Swedish population said, “Enough!” So Sweden reduced government’s role, cutting public spending, privatizing the national rail network, abolishing certain government monopolies, lowered taxes and reformed the pension system, among other moves. Now Sweden is regarded as one of the richest country’s on the planet. Here’s more from Norberg and host John Stossel on Stossel TV.
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