By Ben Shapiro
Tuesday, August 21, 2018
One of the least charming elements of the new push for
democratic socialism by members of the media and the American Left is the utter
willingness to ignore context. Take, for example, Elizabeth Bruenig of the Washington Post. Bruenig consistently
celebrates the virtues of supposedly socialist Nordic countries:
The Nordic states are most famous
for their generous welfare systems: free college, universal health care, long
and well-funded parental leave, heavily subsidized child care and much more. .
. . The people of the Nordic states have come a long way toward democratizing
ownership, dispersing wealth, lowering inequality and placing workers’ lives under
their own control — in other words, the socialism of the Nordic states seems
pretty close to the kind of socialism that I wrote would satisfy me.
All of these ideas could, Bruenig implies, be transferred
overnight to America, making us fair and prosperous.
Obviously, this is untrue. Norway has 5.2 million people;
Finland has 5.5 million; Denmark has 5.7 million; Sweden has just under 10
million. This is fewer people than the population of the state of Texas. Wealth
creation in Nordic countries long predated the advent of nationalization and
socialist enterprise; so did income equality. And state ownership of enterprise
in Nordic countries does not mean that those enterprises run along the
anti-profit lines that democratic socialists tend to favor; precisely the
opposite. It would be more apt to call Nordic ownership of assets a model of
state-run capitalism than of socialism per se.
But the most irritating aspect of the Left’s new
addiction to Nordic “socialism” is that it causes us to ignore the actual
conditions under which Nordic programs flourish — conditions that we would do
well to actually mimic. The major advantage held by Nordic countries is a
cultural focus on education, law-abiding behavior, and hard work.
The crime rate in the Nordic countries is exceedingly
low, and it has been for generations. Every single Nordic country except
Iceland ranks below the OECD average in terms of single-parent households, and
well below the United States. Nordic countries have long been linked with a
strong work ethic, thanks in part to geographic difficulties that require long
hours. As Nima Sanandaji writes, “High levels of trust, a strong work ethic and
social cohesion are the perfect starting point for successful economies.” Of
course, socialist welfare schemes tend to undermine both family relations and
work ethic, and Norway has been facing serious problems with people opting out
of work. (“This is an oil-for-leisure program,” Norwegian economist Knut Anton
Mork told the New York Times a decade
ago.)
Then there are the institutional differences that aren’t
discussed all that often.
A major factor in the success of the Finnish school
system, for example, is largely ignored by the American Left: Half of Finland’s
students opt for vocational schools, meaning that Finnish education focuses
more on job skills than on general education. That’s why 14 percent of degrees
earned in Finland are in STEM fields and 18 percent are in the liberal arts, as
compared with 8 percent in STEM and 38 percent in the liberal arts in the
United States. The conditions in which Nordic unions thrive are similarly
ignored by American liberals: So many Nords belong to unions because those
unions work cooperatively with employers and the government, instead of in the
adversarial mode employed by their American counterparts. As Oren Cass points
out, “[Denmark and Sweden] don’t require workplace elections, good-faith
bargaining by employers, or compulsory dues payments; yet a majority of workers
are union members.” To achieve the same level of unionization in the United
States would require heavy government restrictions on business, because the
Nordic model is so different.
In short, many of the ideas that make Nordic social
programs effective operate in a different context than that of the United
States. To take those programs out of their context and plop them down in the
United States would be, in many cases, to ignore just why they worked in the
first place. An honest discussion of the efficacy of government programs in the
Nordic “socialist” countries would start by taking into account factors other
than mere government control and redistribution.
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