Helsinki, Finland
Credit: Grisha Bruev/ Shutterstock
This is what Americans fail to understand: My taxes in Finland were used to pay for top-notch services for me.
Bernie Sanders is hanging on, still pushing his vision of a Nordic-like socialist utopia for America, and his supporters love him for it. Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, is chalking up victories by sounding more sensible. “We are not Denmark,” she said in the first Democratic debate, pointing instead to America’s strengths as a land of freedom for entrepreneurs and businesses.
Commentators repeat endlessly the mantra that Sanders’s Nordic-style policies might sound nice, but they’d never work in the U.S. The upshot is that Sanders, and his supporters, are being treated a bit like children—good-hearted, but hopelessly naive. That’s probably how Nordic people seem to many Americans, too.
A Nordic person myself, I left my native Finland seven years ago and moved to the U.S. Although I’m now a U.S. citizen, I hear these kinds of comments from Americans all the time—at cocktail parties and at panel […]
I saw that article on another platform, and found it interesting. It made me wonder a bit. The theme seems to be that socialism is a combination of common sense/self interest. There is some truth to that. However, it doesn’t address the bad parts of socialist social planning (and I don’t mean Maoist re-education camps or famines) – namely, not living within our means.
I think this combines with an often unstated but implicitly understood fear – the candidate or government that recommends “investment” appears either mathematically challenged or dishonest, in that the investments don’t necessarily pay a return (and so aren’t really investments), are not in any way self-funding, and often involve borrowing.
This borrowing becomes a drag on future generations (including future governments). A future government can’t use a tax dollar for health if that tax dollar has to service debt for a past expenditure that was not an investment, but simply a current expense.
People understand this, I think, and so resist the call to “help ourselves by helping our neighbour” because while they hear nice words they see a politician trying to raise taxes to feed a bloated beast that benefits only the connected.
We can demonstrate that reducing homelessness costs money, but that it costs less money than emergency health or police action, and so it is wise. That’s the simplest example of “socialism” being common sense/self-interest. However, that concept gets hammered by everyday examples of government financial mismanagement.
This mismanagement (and let’s face it, it’s often not mismanagement, which is somewhat innocent, but quite often pure larceny for the benefit of government, bureaucracies and their connected friends) is not the fault of only conservatives or liberals (does anyone believe that modern conservative politicians really believe in smaller government and financial probity?).
I think we need to have more people wake up and recognize that politics as a team sport is a mug’s game. We don’t really need to elect leaders. We need to elect good governors. There’s a difference.
I found this story to be one of the best on the subject of “Democratic Socialism” which I have read. Thank you Stephan for finding this intelligent piece; one which everyone should read before voting for “more-of-the-same” which, as Einstein said: ” is a fools folly”.