Another week, another libertarian/classical liberal blogger joins the Swedish blogosphere. It’s an unmistakable trend that both JKL Blog and Media Culpa [English] pick up on today. We now have, in no particular order, Johan Norberg [mainly in English], Johnny Munkhammar [Some English], Henrik Alexandersson, PJ Anders Linder, Dick ErixonPer Gudmundson is a part-time participant., The group blog Smorgasbord [in English] and Tobias Henriksson all blogging from an ideological pole near the Timbro Institute, a Swedish think tank in favor of free markets or else a right wing capitalist cabal, depending on your sensibilities.

Those on the left drawn to conspiracy theories might wonder whether the Ludwig von Mises Institute hasn’t been issuing marching orders; but if the left has such thoughts, they have nowhere to blog it. That’s because the one thing more remarkable than the advent of liberal blogging in Sweden is the near-complete absence of credible socialist/social democrat bloggers pushing back.

What these liberal blogs have in common is that they all stay focused, stay on message, and collectively guarantee that no left-wing political shenanigans go unpunished, at least in the Swedish blogosphere. And sometimes, blogging critically about Sweden’s left-wing is less like shooting fish in a barrel than shooting a barrelful of fishIf I have a gripe, it’s that with the exception of the last two on the above list, Sweden’s liberal bloggers don’t allow commenting, which is lame. It’s not as if any of them are Andrew Sullivan yet. But even if they were, that’s is no reason to turn comments off; look at Kos. Oh, and get RSS feeds..

Why no groundswell of left-wing or even just social democrat blogs? My hunch is that in a society where one political perspective has the hegemony, blogging acts as an assymetric weapon in the war of ideas. Blogging is essentially free, scalable, competitive yet freely associative — right up Liberalism’s alley, in fact. Meanwhile, social democrats and the left are sticking to those big old media guns that got them to the top of the pile in the first place. They have yet to adapt.

But the lack of intelligent social democratic countervetting makes the Swedish blogosphere poorer for it. I have yet to read (or find a link to) a good critique of Catherine Hakim’s new book and its reasons for the marked differences between men and women’s salaries in Scandinavian countries (and I can think of some responses, but this is not my battle, and I’d like to read the book first); and where is the serious response to Johan Norberg’s survey of Swedish libraries showing bias in the purchasing of political booksTo be honest, I don’t think a credible retort is possible in the case of library bias.?

In other cases, incisive left critique would do liberal blogs some good, lest they get all flabby and incestuous. For example, Norberg today approvingly quotes a (still permalinkless) Munkhammar post listing a litany of statistics pointing out how Sweden will effectively cease to exist in 2033I’m sure he’s kidding about the 2033 date, but does that mean we are supposed to take all the other data with a grain of salt?. First off, the post is completely unlinked and unsourced, leaving us fact checkers to do all the hard work; second, some of the quoted statistics are old news and have already been parsed to death elsewhere; third, the one new piece of information to me — “In 1999, Sweden was no 4 in the international investment league, in 2002 it had fallen to no 27” — is tendentiously presented. UNCTAD’s week-old 2002 foreign direct investment (FDI) league tables for this notoriously volatile indicator places Sweden 23rd out of 140 nations, far ahead of the EU norm and handily outperforming that Hayekian paradise – the US, in 92nd place – if these things matter to youWhen it comes to outward investment, Sweden came 8th. Belgium is first globally in both tables, but I’m not taking credit for that..

Furthermore, statistics can prove any point. For example, did you know Sweden is actually one of the world’s best places to do business? The World Bank’s month-old report “Doing Business in 2005 — Removing Obstacles to Growth,” ranks Sweden ninth, globally, for ease of doing business. Only two EU members make it into the top ten: Sweden and the United Kingdom. How so? Among EU members, Sweden, together with Finland, has the lowest number of required procedures to start up a business — three. It has among the EU’s lowest start-up costs, at 0.7% of per capita income (only Denmark is lower). Registering property takes one procedure and two days — easily making it the EU’s top performer. Sweden is also the cheapest place in the EU to enforce contracts, at 5.9% of the value of the debt (vs. an EU mean of 12.1%). I’ll leave out the fact that payroll costs are at the EU norm, just to heighten the effect. No wonder Sweden ranks so high in terms of FDIAnd I’ll spare you the stellar results Sweden had in the World Economic Forum’s 2003-2004 Global Competitiveness Report.
Update 2004-10-13: Rankings for 2004-2005..

But I shouldn’t be doing this work — a left-leaning patriotic Swede should, because, basically, I agree with the liberals. It’s just that it takes two sides for political blogging to get truly fun.