Is Norway Almost a Utopia?

In the two major world rankings of well being, happiness and quality of life it is time after time what right wingers dismiss as "outdated social democracies" which win the top places. While the USA and Great Britain, the homes of neo liberalist conservatism, are longer down the list and have a plague of social problems which they would sweep under the carpet, and indeed they try to do so.

When allowed to conduct research without a political agenda, economists and sociologists draw up questionaires and other devices, they come up with the result that high tax, high state mediated service countries are the happiest with the best qaulity of life.

Norway vyes with Denmark, Canada and Switzerland for top place year after year. The reason for this terrible bias towards social democracy isnt really explored, but could it just possibly be that the lowest third those on the income scale have enough money to cover the cost of living, a health service to keep them alive and in work, and free time in which to enjoy a quality of life outside work?

All the ills of paying high taxes and having the state mediate welfare and health services used to be easier to deny for neo conservatives because poor old sweden had a high suicide rate.

After former American president Dwight Eisenhower claimed Sweden had the highest suicide rate in the world, the image of depressed and suicidal Swedes was more or less cemented. But was there ever any truth to this? Eisenhower gave the speech in 1960 where he said that "sin, nudity, drunkenness and suicide" in Sweden were due to welfare policy excess".  Which suited his political ends as the 1950s ideel of the USA on the wave of post war keynsian economics looked like it may create a social democracy with JFK at the helm.

However this was basically a nice bit of inconsistent statistical method, and the reality is different with sweden on average with OECD countries. In fact if you compare to other dark-winter countries like Russia, and indeed the most northerly state in the USA, Alaska it is considerably lower in Sweden.

Sweden has however, fallen out of the top league in quality of life and happiness, Is this because the political consensus has shifted from democratic socialism to a neo liberal , tax and state reduction policy? Like int he UK and the USA, it is immigration whcih gets the blames for the ills of neo liberalist economic policy.

But let us back up here, what the hell is a utopia, how near can we come to it?  What is social democracy and why do the 'worst offenders' score so highly on the happiness tables?

Another way of looking at social democracy is that of a supplier. A monopoly, The government, You pay your taxes and you get no choice, just delivery. However social democracies have moved away from provision of food with a greater degree of market economics in agriculture in particular. Transport too has become less state dominated in Canada, Europe and Australia. When it comes though to health, education and income support, that is where the state plays off against the consumer demand. 

The issue with market economics in general health care is rather clear, It doesnt exist, you have Medicare and a massive lobby movement in the USA rendering health care twice that per capita of high wage, high tax Norway. In other countries you have no where near general or universal health care, with a charity sector attempting to cure the poorest third of society.  Health care is often not something a consumer is in a state to choose either physically, mentally in case of acute illness or accident, nor in a state to possess enough choice by reasoning to make informed health care decisions in the face of opinion which may be marketing communciation to higher profit outcomes for the private firm offering health care via the bonus rewarded doctor.

If we look at the state as a supplier, then we choose a potential monopoly but we have democracy to regn in its excesses via not law work which makes the supplier work for the individual. Such as the health reform act of 1996 in Norway which was based on years of philosophising about how the state supply should respect the individual and not deprive them of their right to choice, information and respect.

The key maybe lies in those damned statistics. The lower third of society are having it all too good in social democracies to the cost of the upper third, with the middle third actually taking the major income and wealth tax burden. This is the core of neo conservative policy over the last 4 decades, and essentially it hasnt been able to get ahead of those pesky social democracies where the state dehumanises the individual by offering such evils as standard health care and public transport.

The core of conservatism is that people should work for their money and the market will decide their worth. If the market delivers then surely hard work should entitle a person to a better quality of life than is achievable in a social democracy? Private health care, private education, private pension. The trouble is there is no nanny capitalism, The end result of the accumulation of capital, economic and political power is that there has to be slavery in order to feed the demands of profit up the chain. Eventually people will be forced into working for a subsistance living and worse, going into debt to purely exist and be able to go to work. That is where we have come to in the two bastions of Neo Conservatism.

Capitalism is no utopia, but the trouble is there is a religion around it and other political beliefs, which hinders the debate on what is pragmatic in society. Labels of negativity are placed upon both 'systems'. We know in their pure state, both raw capitalism and total socialism destroy the rights of the individual  from experiences of Stalinism, Nazi Germany and  1930's  depression and repression in the USA.

We have reached a basal, lowest denominator level of politics in the UK and US where immigration is the scape goat for weak labour policy. Weak "free" labour policy denies people of working themselves out of abject poverty. Capitalism doesnt work for the lowest educated, so blame immigrants !

The issue with social democracy for those who say it holds back society and economic development, is that there is no such thing as the poor rich, the dispossessed wealthy any more, True there was in the post war era, but now we are in a period where the wealthy are pretty wealthy in Denmark, Norway, Canada and in particular Switzerland. They can take enough out of society that they are satisfied with the productivity of plant, property and work force while in being forced to pay back via taxes, they work harder to maintain their status.

Everybody has it pretty good, no one starves or works just to keep themselves on the breadline. Far from being pawns of the state or slaves of capital, people are empowered to be existential individuals freed from mere existence to cover the costs of living. This is the reason social democracies score higher.

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In the next blog , we will consider social democracy, Can We Ever Afford It?