GOP Candidates Should Praise Estonia

With small efficient government, Estonia leads the way:

In the middle of this year, two rating agencies, Standard & Poor's and Fitch, upgraded Estonia's credit rating ... Government debt is about 6.6 percent of the gross domestic product, as compared with 120 percent in Italy, 160 percent in Greece and 80 percent in Germany. In the first two quarters of 2011, the Estonian economy grew at an annualized rate of 8 percent...

"Comparisons are always difficult," he says. "But when we had finally escaped from Soviet socialism, we were sick and tired of government centralism. We wanted precisely the opposite in all respects: We wanted a transparent state. A country that isn't constantly intervening, nationalizing businesses, placing a bureaucracy above everything and imposing rules on people in every respect."

"...The state must clear the way for those who want to achieve something. That's the function of the state."

When the Soviet system collapsed almost exactly 20 years ago, the Estonians crept out from under the ruins, declared independence and reinvented themselves, making sure that their legal system, administration, legislature and economic system were as far from socialist as possible...

Read the rest. Via Instapundit