Welcome to Bernie Land, where people’s disregard for other people’s money is endless.
Here we have among the highest taxes in the world but still haven’t the infrastructure, health care nor education to reflect this. It’s almost like high taxation isn’t the solution to all problems. Try telling that to someone in Bernie Land and see how successful you will be. To question the welfare state is to question morality, empathy and the will to help other people. In other words, it means that you are a selfish prick that would enjoy to watch people starve and to see sick people die. I’m obviously being hyperbolic, but frighteningly, not that much. Even though I’m not responsible for making people dependent on a system that crumbles beneath them – I am the problem.
Here in Bernie Land, we let entitlement run rampant – “You were treated sort of badly by your co-workers, or personal issues does not make you fit for your current type of employment? Six months sick leave for you!” And why not take part in one of our esteemed free (as in paid for by someone else) university educations? Study philosophy, women’s studies, political science (not that it will give you any kind of political perspective since university education is more or less leftist indoctrination) for five years. This education will make it more or less impossible for you to find meaningful work and pay back that humongous amount of money we just “invested” in you. Not only that, the government will give you about $15,000. This is not a loan or anything like that; you will be admitted to a field of work that already has extremely high unemployment rates, and if you are lucky, your alternative is to work for the state, wasting even more tax payer money. Fun!
We here in Bernie Land also encourage small business ownership… as long as you aren’t thinking about pursuing some sort of success in a field where we, the government, have given a pseudo-monopoly to whomever we see fit. And don’t forget the regulations. I don’t know what they are at this moment (I don’t think anyone knows, to be honest). But, they are important and we will enforce them randomly, without warning. And in case you were thinking about opening some kind of cheese and wine store or something like that: don’t. Those monopolies I talked about earlier? Alcohol is one of them. We only allow the selling of alcohol in certain government owned stores. Since we don’t like people here in Bernie Land ‘partaking,’ we try our best to make shopping at these stores as much of a hassle as possible, mostly by having the stores open exclusively at times when people are at work.
I would like to add that if you are thinking about hiring staff for your small business: screw you! You know that salary you pay your workers? It’s only half of the total you will have to spend. There are all kinds of fees and taxes that you will have to pay besides that. If you end up paying less than $30 per hour you are lucky indeed. You can rest easy knowing that we will take 30+% of your employee’s salary as well. Fair is fair right? We have to keep that welfare state afloat somehow.
We here in Bernie Land love the environment. So it’s only natural that we levy exorbitant taxes on everything that is needed to drive a car or heat your home. Sure, this hurts families living in the countryside since they are often dependent on driving far to get to work. It can be especially bad if your family needs several cars. Oh, I almost forgot! Owning a car? Tax! It doesn’t even matter if you use it. It’s a flat tax for everyone based on the age and size of the car, or something like that. The point is that you have to pay. And we like that here in Bernie Land. We know this hurts families in the countryside. But that’s just a sacrifice us living in the city are willing to make. And make no mistake. We control the political climate since we city-dwellers are a larger population. We have no electoral system or anything like that, so we have a lot of say when it comes to what goes on in the countryside. It’s better this way, since they would probably drink alcohol and drive cars all day or something otherwise silly.
There is one thing that should be noted, just to be clear and honest about everything: just because we make you pay all this, we are still as badly managed, incompetent, unorganized, slow, overly bureaucratic, bloated and ineffective as any government. Of course, we will meddle in your life at every possibility and ram your throat with social politics. We have government-owned TV and radio stations here in Bernie Land, which you, of course, paid for. The point is that they should be impartial so that you can get an objective view on politics and see to it that ad revenue and such won’t influence the news. I think you can imagine how objective and impartial these outlets are by now.
If you don’t like how we do things, well too bad for you. We have a parliament with a lot of different parties. Too bad they are all to the left of your American Democrats. So we only have different levels of socialism here in Bernie Land. Any party suggesting anything different won’t have a snowballs chance in hell, so don’t bother. Remember, it’s immoral to question the welfare state. You don’t want to be immoral do you?
* Henrik Karlsson was born, raised and currently lives in Sweden, a socialist democratic country. This has made him realize that it is impossible to improve their current situation with that system, that needy dependent mentality, that suffocating welfare state. To him as a free thinking and independent individual, that is unacceptable. And he realizes that changing the current politicians won’t help; the problem will just repeat itself – the answer is less government.
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