This guy just blew the fuck out of the utopian Scandinavian countries, and their democratic socialism as a failure compared to free-market capitalist America. Yeah, yeah I know that Scandinavia is a socdem free-market society; but Holla Forums always likes to give them handies for how "great" they are.
Is he right? Are Nordic nations welfare states (socdem) a failure like all important leftist thinkers pointed out?
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Ok buddy
lol
I CAN'T BREATHE
How were they liberalized? If I recall they're by all intents and purposes a welfare state.
What are they then, a corpotocracy?
Why do idiots always post their shitty views in YouTube videos on here, can't you people read? Who prefers to watch a video over reading an article?
Sweden, while being the most anti-racist country in the world, has some of the worst segregation and the worst welfare dependency among immigrants in Europe. This is because the swedish welfare state, with it's high taxation and soft sentencing attracts the worst of the immigrants. This is a rational calculation on their part.
The welfare state is bigger than ever before.
They should Archive that shit if they want us to watch it
I'm not giving some asshat views
They're not exactly failures but they're not anywhere near as great as often claimed, these countries have plenty of serious problems. I'm speaking as a dane here.
This. At least have a transcript handy.
Takes me back to the days of /new/, where lolbertarians thought an hour-long video was an effective rebuttal to anything
Not really true. Especially Sweden had much higher government spending before.
...
I stand corrected.
Still, turning up the spending won't fix the problem I addressed.
fuggin pick one already
I'm very confused over this as well. For a bunch of users who really like to shit on America being a capitalist hell hole, they seem very reluctant to call it a free-market economy.
"free-markets" tm, are a neoclassical myth. As is the idea that everything a government does in an economy is socialism.
We deride the idea that markets are supposedly free of market intervention, when really it is a fact that capitalism constantly relies on the state to function properly. Leftists just know this, but libertarians won't admit it.
What's funny is that lolberts will call America "gloriously capitalist" or "actually corporatist" according to the point they're trying to make.
how is a free-market economy a myth? Surely you must have some source.
Why wouldn't they just do away with the whole process of the state and become wholly anarchist? By relying on the state I assume you mean bail-outs for larger corporations, tax breaks, transfer of capital, and barriers of entry for them in order to ensure their monopoly?
Are you from Reddit?
it's a myth
t. reality.
Subsidies, regulations, welfare, taxes, state-sanctioned monopolies, minimum wage, nationalizations and ect are all a part of any decent capitalist political economy. Capitalism literally cannot survive without them.
have an article: robertreich.org
It's not a myth. Go to sub-saharan africa to see it in practice.
I'm new to this board, but I saw a thread a couple days earlier where some people were praising nordic countries. And no I'm not from reddit.
I guess I got mixed up with mixed and market economy and a free-market one.
I never thought they were good.
I've only ever seen them bashed or avoided on a regular basis.
Can somebody summarize his points? If he says something I haven't heard before I'll bother, but when I can't skim through it to get an impression on something I barely care about I'm not going to bother spending half an hour on this.
Norway has a higher GDP per capita than the US for both nominal and PPP.
Those are the points that stuck in my head.
why not just reduce the workweek and have higher wages instead of having massive welfare
more people working for less time
I don't know lad, I'm not a bureaucrat working in a Nordic country.
TBH those all sound like the standard issue bullshit from people not familiar with the system or the culture.
Well, this is pretty easily managed by setting requirements for the welfare, or by lowering welfare to only cover living costs.
Most of the time when immigrants end up on welfare, it's because of his second point - difficulty with assimilation, not knowing anybody, a weak social support structure - and not due to laziness.
Yeah, of course. People who emigrate from Denmark and Sweden are the people who will benefit from this emigration. There is no pressure on people to leave, so people will only leave if it benefits them. This is completely fucking retarded.
Unless he is able to present a causal link, I'll just repeat the old adage: Correlation does not and never will imply causation. Especially on things as far fetched as this.
Also, the socdem party has largely been in support of the liberalization reforms of the past 20-30 years.
The parties with actual SocDem policies are called SF (Socialistisk Folkeparti, The people's socialist party), Alternativet (The alternative) and Enhedslisten (Unity party, the marxist coalition party that came into existence after a bunch of communist parties grew too small, policy is reformist marxist).
How is this related to social democracy?
Denmark has historically had a shortage of labor.
that was a point he brought up in regards to the welfare state.
he presented this as a cultural argument iirc, and said people's lives were healthier thanks to their culture and so on
Another point I found kek worthy:
Since the workers there still don't own the means of production, each hour of work is an hour of exploitation, thus fewer man-hours mean less surplus-value. Porky no likey.
porky no likey welfare taxes either.
Scandinavian countries don't even have a minimum wage, which is one thing I see most supporters of capitalism argue for the most. So arguing against scanidnavia is arguing against taking away minimum wage.
Taxes are a fact of life, he can live with them. But he can't live without exploitation.
Oh as in the welfare is drawing immigrants to the countries?
Yeah well I don't really buy it. Of course when you're emigrating as an uneducated poor third-worlder, you'll be choosing the welfare states first. But all evidence suggests that people won't leave their home countries unless there is great reason to (e.g. civil war).
Immigration wasn't at a scale where it posed any real problem in Denmark before the Syrian crisis, and I will concede that SocDems aren't well posed to handle a crisis like that.
But - and I know this is a bit of a meme, especially in Denmark - I think most of the social problems are caused by the country being immigrated to, and not by the culture of those immigrating. or something in the nature of all immigration.
You know what porky likes even less? Revolution. Threat of revolution forces the hand of politicians. The social democracy was established in Denmark at a time when the labor movement had actual political power. At that time, securing the rights for people who were unable to work (The sick and the disabled) was a lot more important than a shorter working week.
I honestly think that the minimum wage is a pretty bad thing.
When the minimum wage is negotiated by politicians, it means that it's also the politicians who have the power to negotiate it away, it creates a dependency.
In Denmark, we might not have a minimum wage de jure, but we certainly have one de facto.
Unless you're working undeclared (Thats the term google translate gives me, but it sound weird. Tax-evading work, like working off of craigslist being paid in cash. Scab work essentially.), you'll be working under an agreement negotiated between your union and the employer securing you certain rights, including rights regarding wages.
more along the lines that it exacerbates problems and causes alienation as immigrants can't function in the host society, and this causes societal conflict.
Eh, I don't think any of that is innate to social democracy, or at least I think those problems can all be fixed in a social democracy.
I might just concede this point though since I honestly don't know much about it, or have much of a stance on it.
FTR I'm not even a socdem, I tend towards anarchism. I just think that we're doing a hell of a lot better than the rest of the world, and I think that's primarily thanks to the labor movement of the past.
That would be our resident Social Democrat shitposter. Dont listen to Social Democrat shitposter.
In the US unions are horrible. Barely anyone is a member of them and they charge a fee to be in one. So the only ones in a union are a small section of those who worked a long time and are in higher job positions. Many of them only care about their own interests not the interests of the workers as a whole. Also there is a cultural stigma about talking about how much is in ones paycheck so although it is protected by law to disclose it rarely does anyone do so, which makes negotiating harder and paycheck person to person unfair.
kek
Is this what they mean when they say the US is classcucked?
Unions are in a pretty bad place in Denmark as well right now. You pay a fee to be a member in Denmark as well, but it's low enough that most people just pay it, there's enough benefits to being a member that being a scab isn't often worth it, - depending on the union and the line of work of course - even though you're covered by the union-employer agreements either way.
The problems that the Danish unions face are pretty different though, and mostly related to them becoming a part of the established political scene, rather than being the ones making the demands. The reason for this change is mostly related to the influx of labor (via. the EU) and dramatic bureaucratizing.
I can only imagine how completely insurmountable the task of creating a union in the US must have been, and I imagine still is.
The US has some pretty large economical differences across the country, and - plainly - is just fucking huge. The amounts of people involved in an national operation like a workers union is insane enough. I was thinking that it would've made a lot more sense with more local unions, but then they would suffer from the same problems as the European workers unions do post-schengen.
And those problems are without the established culture of competition.
The nordic countries had it pretty good, by virtue of being so goddamn small, being rich in resources and scarce in labor.
Yes, that is one of the meanings. The American proletariat, as well as a most of the European working class, have a culture of competing with each other, rather than standing in solidarity against the employers, which would help them a lot more.
Don't think I've ever seen this tbh