Just when you thought you had a reason to feel depressed about the world, it turned out to be far more promising. Conservatism is now winning ground, even in traditionally socialist nations:

"The last 50 years have shown that private farmers are more socialist than the state. State farms are antisocialist. The only thing they socialized is loss-making," said Oscar Espinosa Chepe, a former state economic adviser who is now a vocal critic of the government.

"There is too much control and bureaucracy that hinders everything," Espinosa Chepe said. "It's impregnated with a 50-year-old operating method that is built on taking orders and is not used to decentralization.

Such quasi-free-market language wasn't heard much in Cuba until recently. But Rául Castro has shown a pragmatic streak on economic matters, trying to improve state efficiency. In July 2008 he surprised many by advocating a shift away from the orthodox socialist concept of equal pay, arguing that those who were more productive should be paid more.

Less bureaucracy and State intervention, more competition, and more incentives to ensure that harder work leads to a greater pay off--that's the private market proving its simplicity and efficiency. Even hardcore socialists like Raul Castro understand this, which is why he's cutting back on government programs and is instead trying to motivate his socialist army of workers to do their part for the national economy.

I bet he'll see clear improvements over time, unlike the Obamaramafied Amerika, which attempts to softly emulate the European model. Naturally, with historical proof in mind, we know that the European socialist model of society is inferior to a deregulated market where individuals are forced to take personal responsibility and work together for their communities. Sweden is an excellent example of how a society can improve - and degrade - depending on whether it chooses the Right or Left path:

Beginning in the 1870s, however, Sweden created the conditions for developing a high-growth, free-market economy with a slowly growing government sector. As a result, Sweden for many years had the world's fastest-growing economy, ultimately producing the third-highest per capita income, almost equaling that in the United States by the late 1960s. Sweden became a rich country before becoming a welfare state.

Sweden began its movement toward a welfare state in the 1960s, when its government sector was about equal to that in the United States. By the late 1980s, government spending grew from 30 percent of gross domestic product to more than 60 percent of GDP.

These policies and outcomes greatly diminished the incentives to work, save and invest. Economic growth slowed to a crawl. Other countries that avoided the excess spending, taxing and regulation of Sweden grew more rapidly, leaving Sweden in the dust. Sweden is still a prosperous country, but far from the top, and its per capita income has fallen to just about 80 percent of that in the United States.

So the short story is that Sweden came out of deep poverty around the late 1800s by embracing Conservative solutions, but entered a decline during the 1960s when the Social Democratic (center-leftist) hegemony took over, and today Sweden has entered a post-welfare phase where welfare reforms are embracing more and more market solutions instead of government take-overs. As a result, we're rapidly taking back what we lost during the 60s.

There is no doubt that a form of sound Conservatism, preferably similar to the one Corrupt advocates, will lead to greater prosperity and positive hope for the future of Europe, but where or who is the voice to carry this message around in the otherwise politically stalled Europe? Here is one prominent figure Alfred and I approve of:

Until recently, Daniel Hannan's political career appeared to be in rude health. After ten years as a Conservative MEP he had become the darling of the party's libertarian right, acquiring a large following among grass-roots Tories. His speech in the European Parliament denouncing Gordon Brown as a "Brezhnev-era apparatchik" was watched by thousands on YouTube, earning him a prominent slot at the Conservatives' spring conference. His passionate Atlanticism and his stylish turn of phrase had made him a staple of America's conservative talk shows.

But after using a succession of US television appearances to attack Britain's National Health Service, Hannan stands accused of undermining David Cameron's modernising mission and of handing Labour cheap ammunition for a spring election campaign. Hannan has made his views on health care clear for some time - in his most recent book, The Plan: Twelve Months to Renew Britain, published last year, he advocates the introduction of a Singapore-style system of personal accounts - but it took the increasingly fractious debate over President Obama's health-care reforms to bring them to public prominence.

Like John Redwood during the mid-1990s - a man Hannan hails as an "Old Testament prophet" - he could become the standard-bearer of the Thatcherite right, those who continue to believe in Conservatism as a transformative project. Hannan's brand of Conservatism, advocating a profound rupture with New Labour, exhilarates those activists privately disquieted by Cameron's more evolutionary approach.

What we have predicted before can, and will, come true:

After the speech, a generic mob of fork-wielding peasants bursts into the chamber and carries Gordon Brown to the nearest guillotine. Daniel Hannan MEP duly receives an important government posting.

And so victory is ours, if we dare to seize it.