Comparative advantages

In Sweden, only dark explanations can explain the burning cars.

I’ve written before about the particular inability of progressive societies to assimilate outsiders. In short, if you can’t judge, criticize or punish, by what mechanism do you expect to assimilate anyone?

One possible answer is by being really nice. What better place to test this answer than Sweden? Oops.

This is sad to see since the Nordic countries have been stable places to live with good government (this doesn’t mean I like all their policies, but the results have been generally good – how quickly they become anarcho-tyrannical!). These parts of the internet have long been predicting that the days of peace and stability are numbered thanks to their immigration policies. Alas, it appears we were right.

Your cars may be on fire, but at least the chapulas will be cheap, plentiful, and oh so tasty.

It’s fashionable to blame lack of jobs for failed assimilation (though one wonders why the US would begin increasing immigration during a recession if this is the new official answer to why immigration fails). Indeed, it’s basically impossible to seriously believe that lots of welfare in combination with lots of unemployment and lots of diversity is a recipe for anything other than war and chaos.

Mass immigration coupled with declining job prospects for low-skilled workers is scary:

There are really two choices before us as we think about the future of jobs in an age of information. Either most human beings are about to become economically obsolete, or the information economy can find a use for their talent and hard work. Much depends on which of these two pictures turns out to be the best description of the future.

If we believe in the first alternative, we are going to start planning for the mother of all welfare states. There will be a period of transition, but something like 80 percent or more of the population is going become superfluous to the economy. There will be no jobs where the work of this group could command a living wage; the state must somehow make provision for them or wait for them to fall into poverty and risk the social explosion that will probably follow.

If that happens, you don’t want to be near the diversity.

The jobs argument for Sweden is anyway sketchy:

This attitude is particuarly disturbing because Sweden has invested more energy and money to integrating immigrants than any other European country. It’s also reliably prosperous: there’s no mass unemployment, as in France or Spain. What’s happening around Stockholm, then, can’t be explained away as a reaction to official neglect or poverty. Rather, it’s a predictable consequence of mass immigration from the Third World into a small, ethnically and culturally homogeneous society.

Indeed. With so many first world countries experimenting with mass third world immigration for several decades now, you’d expect at least one of them to have succeeded at some point, if only by accident. Instead, cars are aflame and heads are literally rolling in the streets.

One must, of course, blame the perpetrators of these crimes. Nevertheless some people have designed, argued for, and implemented these policies on grand scales despite totally predictable results. Alas, it appears they’ll be more than enough blood to stain the hands of the perpetrators and their enablers.