Friday, October 06, 2006

About the New Swedish Government

Today, the names in the new Swedish government were announced (until today we only knew that Fredrik Reinfeldt would be Prime Minister). The appointment that received most international attention was that former Prime Minister Carl Bildt was named Foreign Minister.

It seems that ex-libertarian turned technocratic centrist economist Anders Borg will be Finance Minister. That was the most likely choice and given the alternatives, it was a relatively good choice. While I strongly disagree with many of his current views, the other possible choices wouldn't have been any better and compared to the others, he understands economics better.

One of the most surprising choices was to appoint Cecilia Stego-Chilo, until now the leader of free market think tank Timbro as culture minister. Let's hope that this is not a sign that Timbro is league with the centre-right government, as Timbro needs to be a independent group that pushes public opinion in the direction of free markets and smaller government, even if this means defying the current government.

The two worst are Nyamko Sabuni as Minister of Integration and Gender Equality and Andreas Carlgren as Enivironmental Minister. Sabuni have proposed a number of antilibertarian authoritarian ideas such as banning religous schools and a mandatory government examination of all young girls vaginas to the deal with the small problem of female genital mutilation that only exist in some immigrant groups from East Africa . Andreas Carlgren lost all credibility when he as chief of the Agency of Integration tried to have everyone believe that the Social Democrats had pursued a successfull integration policy.

A mixed bag, in other words, just as the government's policies are a mixed bag of good and bad.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home