Haiti and Denmark: Lessons in Destroying a Nation

When Oprah Winfrey was in Denmark to help the Olympic bid for Chicago, she took the opportunity to create an exposé of this socialist utopia. She was absolutely giddy to discover how wonderful Denmark was with free education, free healthcare and free sunshine. She aired her special this week just as Haiti had its terrible earthquake. For liberals such as Oprah and her good friend President Obama Denmark may be their dream for America but Haiti would be the reality.

In a socialist utopia the idea is to redistribute the wealth so that there are no poor. No country in Europe has undertaken such radical wealth redistribution such as the Danes. Free education through college and free medicine are among the reasons they have been rated the happiest people on earth. They are held up as health conscious and environmentally conscious; nearly all adult Danes ride bicycles on a daily basis with children and groceries in toe, according to Winfrey. It makes you want to just bring all that happy socialism here, does it not?

Now with all due respect to Oprah, it’s time for the truth. Denmark does have an advantage over other socialistic experiments such as the USSR and Cuba. It introduced socialism without violence; it just ignored its own constitution and slowly implemented it one law at a time. Sound familiar? There are no poor living on the streets because the government pays 90 percent of your salary when you get laid off or fired. But there are no rich there either. Taxes take 70 percent of the Danes’ income, preventing people like Oprah from every becoming wealthy.

But the high taxes pay back in the form of great social services. The Danes think so, which accounts for the high rating of contentment. But this mindset is set more in cultural thinking than reality. The Danish lifespan has not increased since 1970 and now rates near the bottom in the European Union. Like all universal health care systems, it rations care and people die regularly waiting for needed operations. Many blame this on drinking and smoking; Danes smoke at almost twice the rate as Americans. Oprah’s claim that Danes are health and environmentally conscious seems ridiculous. How could all the smoke be good for either their health or environment? It owes more to the fact that the government forces them out of cars with 90 percent sales tax, 180 percent registration fee, annual car taxes, fuel taxes and green taxes. Trust me, they are not riding bicycles in subzero weather because they want to.

But at least all that free education is providing them with greater opportunities, right? Actually, the US has twice the percentage of college graduates as Denmark. People here choose what they wish to study and the free market rewards them. Denmark tells students what to study although applicants are allowed to make requests. People are increasingly requesting social studies and less math and science. Maybe the schools do a lousy job preparing scientist or maybe the stark right-and-wrong nature of math and science is too harsh for a socialist society. Maybe something a little less concrete, like global warming, will get more interest in “science.” Maybe they should host a world conference on the subject. Oh, wait, they did, just before being plunged into the coldest winter of the last 50 years. Oh, well.

Denmark does such a lousy job planning its economy, it relies heavily on Germany to provide what it does not (sort of like those Canadians we have). People who want to leave find the government continues to strip them of their wealth through taxation of pensions after they leave, even though they lose all rights to vote as an expatriate. Some have proposed laws requiring repayment of education expenses first which would create a new iron curtain. For those who stay, pensions are capped at inflation plus three percent. Savvy investors are taxed 100 percent beyond that. I bet they forgot to tell Oprah that.

For all this socialistic engineering Denmark is just Haiti in the making. Haiti is overrun with corruption. Denmark has allowed judges and politicians to say the constitution means whatever they want it to and are now selling judgments and votes in return for money and favors. Haiti takes most of the wealth of its people through criminal extortion and corruption. Denmark does it through taxation. Crime in Haiti is out of control, especially violent crime. Crime in Denmark since 1960 has gone up 700 percent, although the population has hardly changed. Violent crime has risen steeper. Both Haiti and Denmark invent nothing and export little. Neither has a military developed well enough to repel an invasion from a country like Iran and are, therefore, dependent on other nations for their own defense. Because the incentive to work in Haiti has been destroyed by criminals, few are employed and crushing poverty is spread equally. In Denmark less than 10 percent lived on the dole in 1970. Today it is eclipsing 20 percent. Counting that with government employees, about 40 percent of the population lives off the government. Destroying the work ethic through the welfare state means some good times for now but Haiti is coming to a Dane near you.

Now as the US goes off to rescue Haiti, let’s try to learn some lessons while we are there. Corruption destroys nations. It isn’t just about sex and I don’t care what the senators from Louisiana and Nebraska said, you can’t go around buying votes. You can’t keep taking from us, even if you think we are rich. High taxation is just legal extortion. Governments cannot spread the wealth around, just the poverty. And the constitution says what the founders meant. It was put there precisely to stop you from cramming universal healthcare down our throats. Go help the Haitians but then help us by getting out of our way, out of our lives and out of our pockets. Then go help the terrorists and I don’t mean with clean water, art therapy and tax-payer funded tours of New York!