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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 20, 2026

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Sweden is cold. Anywhere that has boilers in houses is cold. Winters with average temperatures around freezing are cold.

Lower tax than most other places in Western Europe

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tax_revenue

Sweden is 10th in the world in tax revenue as % of GDP, behind the UK, Norway and Denmark. Sweden is high tax!

Swedish welfare spending is indeed lower than much of Europe. However it is still gigantic compared to the welfare spending in third world countries.

Consider also the beauty of Swedish women to say, Guatemalans. Or Bangladeshi women. Or Tanzanian women.

I think you're looking at Sweden from an insanely skewed perspective.

This seems to be based on the human intellectual arrogance

There are robots doing food delivery in Moscow right now. Furthermore, raising the price of these roles by restricting immigration accelerates automation.

Are AI/robotics companies going to try and disrupt an $8 per hour labour meat-processing industry or focus more on the $50-60+ software industry? Price signals guide automation, alongside the actual structural difficulties of course. Cutting up meat is really not that hard but we've adopted this insane economic system where cheap, low-productivity labour is subsidized by the taxpayer in pensions, progressive taxation, social services.

Sweden is 10th in the world in tax revenue as % of GDP, behind the UK, Norway and Denmark. Sweden is high tax!

Quibble, but the World Bank figures on the left-hand-side of that table are worthless, because they exclude state and local taxes, and taxes labelled as "social security contributions" or similar. Using the more accurate UN figures on the right-hand-side (which still look too low when eyeballed), Sweden is 4th, and the UK at 20th is in the middle of the pack of first-world countries. The Nordic countries and France have very high taxes, even by Euroleftie standards. I'm not sure what is going on with New Zealand.

The UK shows up as very high tax on the World Bank table because essentially 100% of our taxes are collected by central government.