19/05/2005 6:19:49 pm
"We - the State. Yesterday, I spent most of the afternoon at the Swedish Educational Broadcasting Company (UR). We were filming the last episode of a series about the knowledge society. It was to be an hour of debates and facts. I was in a panel with, for example, P-O Edin and Lotta Gröning. To a large extent, the topic concerned what happens now that more jobs are moving abroad - what will come next? And what demands does this development put on Sweden to be successful? It is a very important discussion. UR had made a very ambitious setting and everything, but the discussion soon gave me a Kafka-like feeling. Everyone talked about what "we" should learn, what strategies "we" should have, that "we" can not leave anyone behind, what kinds of educations "we" should promote, what "we" should subsidize, etc. This all presumes first that there is a central force able to do all this, and second, that it is possible to plan the future development. It was obvious that the "we" everyone were talking about was the state. The state - "we" - should fix the future, one way or another. A bold comparison may be to imagine a debate in 1988 in Moscow on how Gosplan could make life better for everyone - not if Gosplan was to do it at all. We can never forsee the development in detail and therefore the state can never centrally plan everything in detail. That is what Hayek and the total failure of the planned economy teaches us. UR can do series 24 hours a day about that - there will be no good answer. In fact, when the state tries, it often stops development. It takes so much resources from society that would otherwise have been put to productive use and puts into its grand but failing schemes. We can only release the creative forces of society - that is when the future always improves. I was the only one saying that. What does that say about Sweden?s future?