The Swedish Welfare State Is on Fire

Lew RockwellIn case anyone still thinks Sweden is the model…from Gary North at LewRockwell.com:

Stockholm’s rioting goes on, night after night. The police seem powerless to stop this.

Immigrant youths are in the streets, burning cars that belong to immigrant adults.

Certainly, wandering around Husby last week, it was hard at first glance to see quite what the problem was. Built in the 1970s as part of the “Million Programme” that aimed to give affordable housing for all Swedes, the estate is one of dozens on Stockholm’s outskirts that now house mainly immigrant populations, including large numbers from Somalia, Eritrea, Afghanistan and Iraq.

It turns out that open immigration, a generation of state handouts to immigrants, and tolerance greater than any in Western Europe has not work as planned. Surprise, surprise!

Two decades on, though, “white flight” has left only one in five of Husby’s flats occupied by ethnic Swedes, and many of their immigrant replacements do not seem to share his view that a new life in Sweden is a dream come true. Last week, the neighbourhood erupted into rioting, sparking some of the fiercest urban unrest that Sweden has seen in decades, and a new debate about the success of racial integration.

“In the old days, the neighbourhood was more Swedish and life felt like a dream, but now there are just too many foreigners, and a new generation that has grown up here with just their own culture,” he said, gesturing towards the hooded youths milling around in Husby’s pedestrianised shopping precinct.

“Also, in Sweden you cannot hit your children to discipline them, and this is a problem for foreign parents. The kids can feel they can cause whatever trouble they want, and the police don’t even arrest any of them most of the time.”

Liberalism is coming home to roost in Europe’s model welfare state.

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