The idea of socialism is for the state to provide some goods and or services as a function of government. The people pay taxes and some of that money is used to provide some set of centralized services. The number and extent of the services are dependent on the degree of socialism in place. If you move the socialism slider to 100% it becomes communism. If you move it to 0% you probably have some form of capitalism.
Communism has a pretty bad track record over the past century or so. It might sound nice in theory, but after trying it in multiple places and it resulting in over 100 million deaths I think it is safe to say (or not safe) that it doesn't work well.
Socialism shouldn't get lumped into the exact same pile as communism, but it has it's downsides as well. I have wanted to talk about this since Mr. Sanders made such a run of it for the Democratic nomination. As an avowed socialist he drew a lot of crowds with his pitch for increasing the level of socialism in the United States. I say increase because Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid and other various programs are socialistic.
Mr. Sanders on many occasions held up the Scandinavian countries as examples of democratic socialism working. That is another topic, but for the sake of this post I'm not going to argue it.
So since socialism seems to be working fine in Norway why shouldn't we have more of it here? There are two simple reasons. Diversity and size.
Diversity
Norway is 87% ethnically Norwegian. That is after a recent flood of immigration brought on by the overall increase in immigration into the EU. So until recently Norway was, and even still is, almost completely ethnically, and therefore culturally homogeneous.
That means that the values, biases, and backgrounds of the Norwegian people are all very similar. At least similar compared to the US where "ethnically American" means nothing. We are called the melting pot for a reason.
That homogeneity means that when everyone got together to come up with the kind of socialistic mix they wanted there was a lot of agreement. Also, regardless of your opinion of it or it's rightness, people tend mind giving people like themselves stuff more than people who are different. It's a thing.
All that together it means that Norway was able to find a level of socialism that worked for them because they all largely agreed on what was important.
To make the topic a little more accessible let's use a silly example on how that would play out here in the US compared to Norway.
Let's say that we here in the US and Norway decided that our governments should provide everyone with candy. Private candy selling was no longer a thing and you could only get it from the government.
In Norway they reached a consensus that skittles were the best, and so everyone got a bag of skittles every week. Simple. Some people of course didn't like it, but the vast majority did so it became the law. Administration was a breeze and since they were buying bulk in just one kind of candy they got a really good discount. So even though not everyone liked it, the fact that they got candy and taxes didn't go up much made tolerable.
Here in the US we decided to try it too. However, a big chunk of people really hated blue skittles. Enough that a factory had to be built to open a bunch of bags, pick out the blue ones, and then repackage them. A whole other group were culturally offended by skittles at all and demanded Kit Kats instead. But they insisted on being able to choose which flavor they got on a week to week basis. Because of these exceptions and variables their had to be a cabinet level department created to manage the administration of the candy distribution. Not simple. Not easy. Not cheap.
We have no consistent cultural norms. None. Zero. There isn't a single topic in existence that you won't be able to find sizable groups who disagree. In an open capitalistic society that is fine. Capitalism doesn't force anyone to do anything. It is why the US has been able to manage such a diverse population.
Socialism forces values onto people who don't want them. It is a reason why there is increasing unrest and discontentment with the government.
Tomorrow we talk about size.
No comments:
Post a Comment