This may seem a little off-topic but please bear with me for a moment …
Sweden’s Pirate Party picked up a seat in the EU today on a platform that wants to reduce the “abuses of power and copyright at the hands of the entertainment industries, and make those activities illegal.” They also want to legalize file-sharing for personal use.
While this sounds anti-business and somewhat left of center, their victory actually stems from what they see as government persecution in the form of “harsh copyright laws” and the recent conviction (with, to them, harsh sentences) of the people behind The Pirate Bay.
After the Pirate Bay verdict, Pirate Party membership more than tripled and now stands at over 48,000 registered members … more than the total number of votes they received in 2006.
The defendants case centered around free market ideas, freedom of the individual, and freedom of internet access as The Pirate Bay hosted none of the files in question and other search engines like Google also provide direct access to illegal .torrent files.
While I don’t condone the pirating of creative content, this case provides evidence of an interesting shift in Euro-political thought.
As America leans politically left at the end of this decade, Europe is shifting further right as they recover from the disastrous economic policies of the 1990s. The European Union says center-right parties were expected to take the most seats this election — 267 — in the 736-member EU parliament. Center-left parties were headed for 159 seats. The remainder were expected to go to smaller groups. According to an AP story*:
“Right-leaning governments were ahead of the opposition in Germany, France, Italy and Belgium, while conservative opposition parties were leading in Britain and Spain.
Many Socialists ran campaigns that slammed center-right leaders for failing to rein in financial markets and spend enough to stimulate faltering economies.”
But after their experiment with socialism in the 1990s, voters just weren’t buying it. More from the AP story:
“People don’t want a return to socialism and that’s why the majority here will be a center-right majority,” said Graham Watson, leader of the EU’s center-right Liberal Democrat grouping.”(AP)*
With smaller government and smaller spending political candidates winning in EU elections from every major European economy, one has to wonder whether America will have to endure a prolonged recession or depression under our current anti-business, left-leaning economic policies.
Or will we learn from Europe’s (and others) past mistakes in time to avoid repeating them here?
*AP – Conservatives score wins in EU parliament voting
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