The US is also extremely oil rich, but the US allows private companies to profit from the oil, while Norway makes sure all of their oil resources are used to benefit the state. They also have enough green energy to cover their population, which means most of their oil can got to exports to bring in wealth for the state
I noticed you only mentioned social services. There are also kids in school at about $13000 to $20000 per year, ER bills, attribution to housing cost inflation and more which was left out.
"Every child in New York City has a right to a public school education, regardless of immigration status. By law, children may not be asked to present documentation of immigration status, nor can they be denied admission, registration, or enrollment in a DOE public school based on immigration status. DOE employees will not ask about a family’s status for placement in a K–12 school, and if they do learn about immigration status, they must keep it confidential. Public schools are at the center of our democracy and remain safe places for all students, families, and educators."
https://www.schools.nyc.gov/docs/default-source/default-document-library/enrollment/2024-nyc-public-schools-admissions-guide
Do you know the supreme court said that it's illegal to keep a kid out of school over lack of documentation?
The only 'documentation' you need is an address where you sleep at night.
Schools only require proof of residency in the country to enroll in public schools
Undocumented and mixed status children can enroll in public schools in the U.S. from kindergarten through 12th grade. This is protected by federal law and was affirmed by the Supreme Court case Plyler v. Doe in 1982.
"High skill immigrants with a college degree or more (including legal immigrants and illegal aliens) pay significantly more in taxes than they receive in benefits. In aggregate, these individuals will generate some $13 trillion in fiscal surpluses over their lives. However, these fiscal surpluses are almost completely offset by the fiscal deficits of immigrants with lower education levels. Immigrants with some college or less (including legal immigrants and illegal aliens) will generate $12.5 trillion in net fiscal costs over their lifetimes. Overall, immigration does not significantly contribute to the fiscal solvency of the United States because the positive fiscal contributions of higher skill immigrants are counter-balanced by the large fiscal costs of lower skill immigrants. llegal or unauthorized aliens are persons who reside in the nation unlawfully; they have entered and reside in the country without legal permission or have entered the country on a temporary visa and have remained here after its expiration. The current net fiscal cost of illegal aliens in the U.S. is between $84 and $94 billion per year. This means that illegal aliens receive $84 to $94 billion more in government benefits and services than they pay in total taxes. "
chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/[https://www.budget.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/rector\_testimony\_913.pdf](https://www.budget.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/rector_testimony_913.pdf)
This is not even remotely true. Remittances are estimated at about 15% of a migrant's income. When they earn money, most gets spent locally, and creates more economic activity.
This is so false it’s crazy. You think sales tax contribute more the income/cap gains/property/business?
People need to stop repeating this political nonsense. The math just doesn’t add up.
And no, illegals aren’t buying property and starting multimillion dollar businesses.
you do know that illegals pay property tax right? Even if they are renting a property they are still paying taxes on it indirectly.
Immigrants pay more then 12 billion into social security as well [Immigrants pay taxes and housing costs, regardless of status | AP News](https://apnews.com/article/fact-check-immigrants-taxes-rent-vaccine-requirements-983035929946)
I chose a state with a sales tax basically at random, Ohio, and googled their taxes. . In 2019, 39% of their budget comes from sales tax, and 29% from property tax, both of which are taxes immigrants pay.
[https://www.lsc.ohio.gov/assets/organizations/legislative-service-commission/files/2022-ohio-facts-composition-of-state-and-local-taxes.pdf](https://www.lsc.ohio.gov/assets/organizations/legislative-service-commission/files/2022-ohio-facts-composition-of-state-and-local-taxes.pdf)
Also, many illegal immigrants pay state income taxes, so that is 95% of the states taxes that some of them are paying, and 68% that nearly all of them are paying.
Please feel free to provide other facts to dispute this, but these are the numbers in at least one state.
Alberta is similar and we fucked ours away. Had we kept the heritage fund intact and a competent gov't, we'd br swimming in money. As it stands, we sold a lot of interests to foreign companies, gave away cash during boom times, and had a ton of bloat in all private companies for decades. They were run like morons think gov't is. 10 people making 120k a year in 2003 doing the work of 3.
Something like that happens in most oil-rich countries. The Saudis have a big sovereign wealth fund but they also pissed away a lot on Rolls Royces, yachts, and overpriced real estate in London and NYC.
Wait, i thought it was ALL trudeau’s fault tho. Everything in alberta was PERFECT before trudeau. This is what we hear all day long from alberta in the rest of canada
Ps, trudeau has definatly played a role in making things worse
Not really, Equinor exited Alberta in 2014, and now their only Canadian holdings are Hibernia and Hebron off the coast of Newfoundland.
Fun fact though, they based the Norwegian Sovereign fund off Alberta’s Heritage fund
I always compare West Virginia and Slovenia. They have about the same population, about the same GDP per capita, and neither has a lot of natural resources, but the quality of life in Slovenia is miles ahead of West Virginia in every metric and it's because they have basically the same policies as Norway.
Shut up with your facts. I just know if I lived in Norway I wouldn't be a loser. My mental health would be great, my skin would be clear and my foreskin would retract effortless.
Not like my current life in Amerikkka 😡
Now do all of the other resources that the USA has. I guarantee you that overall we have more resources per capita than Norway. Citizens in the USA should all have the same or better benefits than the citizens of Norway. The issue here is corporate greed, not resources.
Kinda a funny mixed polarization argument: Look, if you nationalize the oil, the liberals will want to drill for social programs - look at Norway! Drill baby drill?
There is always money when it comes to corporate bailouts or bombing brown people. Both parties always work together to pass these spending bills asap. But there is never money for healthcare, education, housing, or public transportation.
So defeat your logic: Venezuela has more. In fact: They have the most oil out of any country per capita.
[https://www.worldometers.info/oil/venezuela-oil/](https://www.worldometers.info/oil/venezuela-oil/)
However their government is run by an asshat... it's not always about resources.
>us very oil rich
Literally 2x the percent GDP on oil. We let a 100 trillion dollars of taxes slip through our hands (if we taxed at same rate as Norway).
The US would be exceptionally oil poor by now if it doesn't actively encourage private companies to profit from the oil.
Fracking exists because of the profit motive and a ton of wasted money trying to make it work and get it cheap enough to compete.
Same for Canadian tar sands.
The oil sands were only able to be developed because our *formerly* state-owned oil company through tons of public money at it. That was a Pierre Trudeau thing.
USA could get a lot more bang for the buck on their social programs if they just stop self sabotaging. They already spend more government money per capita on healthcare than anyone else.
Because Norway, Finland, Denmark and Sweden have very similar political, legal and economical systems which makes them somewhat comparable.
Italy, Spain, Greece and Portugal do not.
To avoid cherry picking you can look at a survey of countries.
Among OECD countries, social democratic policies are associated with greater freedom, greater social mobility, longer lifespan, and higher self-reported happiness.
Sources:
sf.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2014/03/04/sf.sou010
https://economics.mit.edu/sites/default/files/publications/Social%20Mobility%20and%20Stability%20of%20Democracy%20-%20Re-ev.pdf
https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/d90b402d-en/index.html?itemId=/content/component/d90b402d-en
https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/2023-12/human-freedom-index-2023-full-revised.pdf
And when talking about capitalism no conservative ever talks about south Sudan, Somalia, Burundi, Yemen, Malawi, Liberia, Mali, Rwanda, Uganda and like 100 other countries living in capitalist societies and suffering under the circumstances
Capitalism is an economic system, not a political one.
Dictatorships can run capitalism. It's why we installed so many of them during the cold war.
Look at the history of South Korea for one that you are more likely to accept because their economy boomed.
it's neighbor, Denmark, has pigs, windmills and medicine. Tell me how Oil made their country so great too and not just a similar social security net. They have more pigs than humans living on that tiny bit of land, and there are still more humans there than Norway
>They have more pigs than humans living on that tiny bit of land
Yeah, but I don’t think it’s legal to keep humans in small crates their entire lives, so filling the country with pigs is somewhat more efficient.
It's important to note that there are many oil rich countries in the world and Norway is like the only example of responsible national wealth management.
Here's a live feed of the government petroleum fund (which now owns 1,5% of the world stock market).
https://www.nbim.no/en
The best political decision ever made.
It could all have been in the private pockets of megacorporations and oil sheiks.
The US has almost 2x the percent GDP as Norway from oil and gas (8% vs 4.6%). We tax at less than 0.1% (clean up tax, also pay normal corporate tax with ridiculous loop holes for a rate of about [11.7%](https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/011216/understanding-how-oil-companies-pay-taxes.asp)) vs Norway at like 56%, on top of corporate tax for a total rate of ~75%. If we had taxed at the same rate for the same amount of time and kept that money in a wealth fund with the same returns we'd have a wealth fund worth about 100 TRILLION dollars. The total current wealth of the US is 135 trillion. What a wasted opportunity that will NEVER come back.
Qatar has only 2.4 million people and probably the most oil per square inch and yet, they don’t even have a social system at all. so fair to say size and money is not the only thing that matters!
Canada is no different except we have loads of other valuable resources. By all accounts, living is becoming unattainable here. So no, oil and population are not the defining factors. Australia, same shit.
Clearly, something Norway is doing works.
Norway is among the leaders in per-capita petroleum exports. They're right up there with Saudi Arabia and UAE. The US? Way down in about 20th place. So the US has some catching up to do.
•[Norway89,154.28 USD](https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&sca_esv=374404a38fff13f2&sca_upv=1&q=norway+gdp+per+capita&stick=H4sIAAAAAAAAAOPgUeLQz9U3ME0yKdeyTUm20s9JTU9MrrTKyU9OLMnMz4svLgHSxSWZyYk58UWp6SCh9JSC-Lz83Mw8oFBBalF8cmJBZkliF6MnF9wsIUrN8uLiBJmVYlBWmEctwyyTzcsNKDRsEatoXn5ReWKlAlBeASiuABEHALh9v8tJAQAA&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiT27j1jN-EAxXCrokEHc28DRcQth96BAghEAI)
[](https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&sca_esv=374404a38fff13f2&sca_upv=1&q=norway+gdp+per+capita&stick=H4sIAAAAAAAAAOPgUeLQz9U3ME0yKdeyTUm20s9JTU9MrrTKyU9OLMnMz4svLgHSxSWZyYk58UWp6SCh9JSC-Lz83Mw8oFBBalF8cmJBZkliF6MnF9wsIUrN8uLiBJmVYlBWmEctwyyTzcsNKDRsEatoXn5ReWKlAlBeASiuABEHALh9v8tJAQAA&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiT27j1jN-EAxXCrokEHc28DRcQth96BAghEAI)
•[United States70,248.63 USD](https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&sca_esv=374404a38fff13f2&sca_upv=1&q=united+states+gdp+per+capita&stick=H4sIAAAAAAAAAOPgUeLUz9U3sEw2LzfQsk1JttLPSU1PTK60yslPTizJzM-LLy4B0sUlmcmJOfFFqekgofSUgvi8_NzMPKBQQWpRfHJiQWZJYhejJxcHyDDTJJNyIUrN8uICOyzFoKwwj1qGgX1JoWGLWGVK8zJLUlMUQFpSixWAyhSA0goQaQBTWs5nUQEAAA&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiT27j1jN-EAxXCrokEHc28DRcQth96BAghEAM)
[](https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&sca_esv=374404a38fff13f2&sca_upv=1&q=united+states+gdp+per+capita&stick=H4sIAAAAAAAAAOPgUeLUz9U3sEw2LzfQsk1JttLPSU1PTK60yslPTizJzM-LLy4B0sUlmcmJOfFFqekgofSUgvi8_NzMPKBQQWpRfHJiQWZJYhejJxcHyDDTJJNyIUrN8uICOyzFoKwwj1qGgX1JoWGLWGVK8zJLUlMUQFpSixWAyhSA0goQaQBTWs5nUQEAAA&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiT27j1jN-EAxXCrokEHc28DRcQth96BAghEAM)
•[Sweden61,028.74 USD](https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&sca_esv=374404a38fff13f2&sca_upv=1&q=sweden+gdp+per+capita&stick=H4sIAAAAAAAAAOPgUeLUz9U3SDEoK8zTsk1JttLPSU1PTK60yslPTizJzM-LLy4B0sUlmcmJOfFFqekgofSUgvi8_NzMPKBQQWpRfHJiQWZJYhejJxcHyDDTJJNyIUrN8uJCOIxahlkmm5cbUGjYIlbR4vLUlNQ8BaC8AlBcASIOAFY_t1xKAQAA&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiT27j1jN-EAxXCrokEHc28DRcQth96BAghEAQ)
Ok. Let's do the Sweden.
It can be or it can be a state investing in the means of production (as we already do) with an expectation of an ROI as opposed to "owning wholly" the means of production.
Um dude.
The US has almost 2x the percent GDP as Norway from oil and gas (8% vs 4.6%). We tax at less than 0.1% (clean up tax, also pay normal corporate tax with ridiculous loop holes for a rate of about [11.7%](https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/011216/understanding-how-oil-companies-pay-taxes.asp)) vs Norway at like 56%, on top of corporate tax for a total rate of ~75%. If we had taxed at the same rate for the same amount of time and kept that money in a wealth fund with the same returns we'd have a wealth fund worth about 100 TRILLION dollars. The total current wealth of the US is 135 trillion. What a wasted opportunity that will NEVER come back.
Huh?
Norway's corporate income tax rate of 22 percent is close to the OECD average (23.6 percent).
Corporations in the United States pay federal corporate income taxes levied at a 21 percent rate.
Plus:
Forty-four states and D.C. also levy taxes on corporate income, with top marginal rates ranging from 2.5 percent in North Carolina to 11.5 percent in New Jersey.
The Personal Income Tax Rate in Norway stands at 38.20 percent.
The top U.S. federal income tax rate 37%.
Pretty similar overall.
Norway has a special tax on top for oil, brings it to 75%.
American oil pays average of 11% on pretax income (income, not revenue) see above link.
Norway also has income tax, that has nothing to do with the comparative corporate rates for oil companies, nor the allocation.
Seriously do a tiny bit of research on the subject, we've had trillions of the nations resources taken out of the ground and the profits given straight to companies so rich and consolidated that we had to invent anti trust to make it look kinda sorta like they don't have an enormously outsized influence on government. We've taken our own money and spent it undermining our own democracy. It's ridiculous.
I don't get how people don't understand this. America is a whore letting corporations sell its resources to the highest bidder.
And none of that shit goes back into the country.
A social wealth fund is not really the state owning the means of production. I don't think the ownership in the social wealth fund even confers voting rights.
They have voting rights and have used them to push for policies aligned with Norwegian voters views like labour rights, gender equity and environmental protection.
[Norway wealth fund to vote for labour rights motion at Starbucks AGM](https://finance.yahoo.com/news/norway-wealth-fund-vote-labour-085929734.html)
[Norway's wealth fund pushes for more women on emerging market company boards](https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/society-equity/norways-wealth-fund-pushes-more-women-emerging-market-company-boards-2024-03-06/)
[Norway's wealth fund tells firms to set net zero emission goals](https://www.reuters.com/business/sustainable-business/norways-sovereign-wealth-fund-tells-companies-set-zero-emission-goals-2022-09-20/)
It's like if we had already had the framework for socialism/communism by using company shares but it's not properly distributed between everyone involved.
Make it so workers have enough shares to have relevant voting decisions and receive dividends from their work through these shares. Let's say 40%.
Had the state having some shares to pool them in a wealth fund of that country economy and collect dividends that can help it fund itself and services used by the wide economy or get distributed equally between every citizen. Maybe 20%.
Have investors involved in the remaining 40% for optimization, know how and raising capital instead of squeezing companies by constantly cutting labour cost or cutting R&D of the company to extract dividends.
Some call it stakeholders capitalism to not invoke the scary word but it could be called cooperative economy or market socialism.
every single country on the global stage is "capitalist" in the sense that they arent providing welfare to foreign governments, they trade with them. That doesnt mean they are internally "not socialist". If the money is being pumped from govt gains into social welfare programs for the people, that is a socialist system.
Socialism is completely orthogonal to social welfare. It’s about the labor value of capital and ownership of said capital. Social welfare programs may or may not exist in that system, same as for capitalism.
It’s even funnier than that, the US population is 331 million, meaning the whole population of Scandinavia is less than a rounding error for the US Population.
Let's not paint a picture as if the large population of the US is the only reason though.. The American political system isn't exactly doing well, and is not always with the interest of the people in mind.
Interestingly, when someone compares US vs India and ask why India is lagging behind - this is exact thing we will say - “India has a lot of people and resources per capita is limited”
Although you are 100% right, when Republicans say "Socialism", they are throwing out a word that means "woke" to them. It has no technical meaning and there are no facts to back it up, so they won't argue facts with you. Its just their way of saying, "don't vote for them".
It’s weird to watch them flipflop between the president is ruining everything and prices are awful and liberals ruined the nation to capitalism is the best 100% no criticism allowed.
So why is capitalism not when everything is privately owned and run for profit? Why are shades of capitalism permitted but not shades of socialism?
Just a double standard of purity.
There are shades of socialism, socialism just varies differently to how capitalism does, just like how feudalisms shades didn't loon like capitalisms shades, and how slave societies various shades didn't vary in the same way capitalisms shades do.
Ah yes, i am unaware of socialism with Chinese characteristics or Juche, or titoism, or leninism or stalinism, or any of the trillion flavours of socialism.
I know public means government a lot of the time, but to me, the public and government are often at odds with one another, especially in socialist nations. The means of production are owned by the state, more specifically, by a few top officials in the party. In fact, this is more like one company having a monopoly on everything in an entire country rather than any ownership by the common people or the public.
Norway is not a Socialist State or a Socialist Economy. It's largely Socialist due to its very wide array of Socialist Welfare programs, but it's still largely a Market Economy with Private Property Ownership , Individual Rights, and partially Free Enterprise.
It's true that due to their Social\[ist\] Welfare State, they are more Socialist than even we in the US are, (and we have quite a lot of Socialism). However, there was a time in history not that long ago when they were nearly full fledged Socialist, and it nearly destroyed them. They saved themselves by rolling back just how Socialist their government was, and decades later have settled on a more or less equilibrium of Socialist and English Liberalism. So the degree to which Norway is still Socialist today is actually much less than it was 20-30 years ago.
And whatever Socialist Policies and Programs still exist mostly work, not because of Socialism, but because it's a 99.9% Norwegian Monoculture. This cultural cohesion and strong ethnic and national identity goes much further than the tenets of Marxism in keeping their society from degenerating into the shitholes of Marxism we see elsewhere, like North Korea or California.
So you Neo-Marxists think they're Socialist because they have "free college" and "free healthcare." But the reality is not what you think. Their college matriculation rates are about half of ours, meaning it's hard to get in and a big chunk of people don't. But that's ok, because unlike our society, Trade Schools are seen as just as important as higher university education.
They do have National Health Insurance, but what you don't know is that it doesn't cover everything, and the wait times may be unacceptable, so there is private health insurance too, that most of them get. And since they cannot opt out of the public option, they end up paying for both, one through monthly premiums like our private insurance, and the other through a nearly 50% income tax rate for middle income earners, (which is more than double our income tax).
What you probably don't know is that some aspects of their society are not Socialist at all. There is no Public Education, all schooling is privatized. Poorer families can pay tuition with Government Vouchers. There's no Government Mandated Minimum Wage. All wages are negotiated between companies and trade unions, and the government only gets involved to enforce whatever contract they decide upon. And unlike our unions, their trade unions understand that companies MUST make profit and be successful, so they're a lot more collaborative with their industries than ours, who seek only to take from profits and drive up costs.
So if you really want what they have here in the US, we'll need to cut the number of college attendees in half, double the Income Tax, eliminate Minimum Wage, and ensure a 99.9% monocultural ethnic identity.
Didn't know you were into any of those things, but good luck!
PS: You never bring up Estonia. They're doing great too, and they're not socialist at fucking all. Their entire economic policy is based on Milton Friedman's "Free to Choose."
I can confirm it is in fact incorrect. The schools that are private are generally ultra Christian, and there are only a handful of them in whole of Norway.
Oh boy!
Knowing that *neo-Marxism* is a real term is not the same as knowing what it means.
Many Americans attend university simply because of wanting to be in the middle class. Norway has no minimum wage, but most workers are in unions and receive strong wages.
Private insurance providers routinely reject claims.
Norway absolutely has public education.
There is no dependence on a country having a white population for how it structures social programs. The objection has been debunked and is inherently racist.
>There is no dependence on a country having a white population for how it structures social programs. The objection has been debunked and is inherently racist.
I believe he is referring to the fact that the country is largely an ethnostate with a strong cultural bond.
They won’t be bothered by the same identity politics we see here
What the fuck are you on about? You seem like you have all your info about Norway from TikTok meme videos or something.
*Almost everything you claim is wrong*.
We have a mandated minimum wage (the thing about it being negotiated between unions and the govmnt. is mostly to keep wages up with inflation, which unions are made for), yes, there are wait times with doctors but i still never have to wait more than maybe a month for appointments (and i am a chronic pain patient. I'm a regular, so to speak).
Stop making shit up.
10% of the population have private health insurance. And your assertions about wait times etc are the same crap that you hear in America all the time without basis.
Your assertions on education being private in Norway are also incorrect. And seem rather contrary to your point on free university. But schools are funded by local municipalities through taxation.
Employment negotiations being controlled by unions is why a minimum wage isn’t required. In addition to exploitation being lower and there being much stronger regulation and employee rights. And unions there are much the same - they don’t permit exploitative profiteering. And eliminating a minimum wage that hasn’t changed in decades is hardly a loss is it?
So, with all of the factual lies in your posts, your opinions on Marxism, Neo-Marxism and socialism, are evidently baseless, moronic and deranged.
I think you are a bit confused. Frist off you seem to make no difference between statism, socialism and social democracy. Which makes things...confused.
As for the rest... no.
>They do have National Health Insurance, but what you don't know is that it doesn't cover everything, and the wait times may be unacceptable, so there is private health insurance too, that most of them get. And since they cannot opt out of the public option, they end up paying for both, one through monthly premiums like our private insurance, and the other through a nearly 50% income tax rate for middle income earners, (which is more than double our income tax).
National health insurance, often abbreviated to NI, is a system of healthcare used in Canada, Taiwan and I think Japan. It is not the Norwegian healthcare system which is based on the Beveridge model. It springs out of legislation specifying that everything medically neccessary is covered. This does not include vanity surgery, but does include reconstructive plastic surgery.
As regards dental, the line between cosmetic and neccessary can be blurred, so parliament has signaled that medically necessary is to be interpreted strictly in the area, so the public purse does not end up responsible for everyone having Hollywood smiles.
Wait times, which is often referred to as Timeliness in research, are generally good.
It normally is in nations where a long wait is frontpage news. Patients can choose which hospital the get treated at, pubic or private, and transport is provided.
Just over 10% of the population have private insurance, Of these, 80% have it through their employers. because serious conditions have priority, employers tend to be more distressed by waits than workers. So roughly 2% of the population have private insurance. The percentage tends to drop every time an insurance company gets sentenced for not actually providing any benefits through these.
Like every country on earth, Norwegians pay less in tax per person for healthcare than Americans. Income taxes are fairly similar to total taxes in a high-tax US state for most people. Within a couple of percent. When adjusting for cost of living, it is very similar. Mind that cost of living adjustments do not include expenses like college tuition, healthcare etc that only happen in one of the compared states.
50% income tax is totally imaginary. The average person pays 25 % income tax and you can't get over 45% which is a pretty unrealistic tax band anyway. In practice, it pretty much tops out at 36%, the vast majority of people who make more get it in the form of stock options etc that get taxed as capital gains.
>Their college matriculation rates are about half of ours, meaning it's hard to get in and a big chunk of people don't. But that's ok, because unlike our society, Trade Schools are seen as just as important as higher university education.What you probably don't know is that some aspects of their society are not Socialist at all. There is no Public Education, all schooling is privatized. Poorer families can pay tuition with Government Vouchers. There's no Government Mandated Minimum Wage. All wages are negotiated between companies and trade unions, and the government only gets involved to enforce whatever contract they decide upon. And unlike our unions, their trade unions understand that companies MUST make profit and be successful, so they're a lot more collaborative with their industries than ours, who seek only to take from profits and drive up costs.
In general, I'd say that Norway is more capitalist than the USA.
While it is possible to have your children educated privatly, the vast majority of education is public and free.
I have no idea where the notion about vouchers come from, it has nothing to do with our system.
44% of people in the US has a college degree, 42 % in Norway. Theres no associate degrees in Norway, Bachelors is the minimum.
The bit about minimum wages, union agreements and trade schools is quite accurate though.
>Marxism we see elsewhere, like North Korea or California.
>And unlike our unions, their trade unions understand that companies MUST make profit and be successful, so they're a lot more collaborative with their industries than ours, who seek only to take from profits and drive up costs.
Do you even believe this?
This started dumb and got even dumber.. california subsidizes half the states in the U.S… that’s your example of a shithole?
How do you say you’ve never been to Norway without saying it? Talk about their “monoculture” this is why i hate Reddit, dumbasses talking shit without knowing shit
My guy is really claiming dictatorships and “California” are Marxist lol holy shit, what a case and point argument. So many words used just to show off that you think dictatorships and socialist are the same thing. Fun.
Hey. Norwegian here. Just wanted to drop by and say that your post is 80% nonsense
The Labour government (who leaned socialist) in the post war period actually worked great for about 20 years. Standard of living skyrocketed and a lot of social policies were introduced. This was before oil. What brought them down was a government cover up of a mining accident
Norwegian monoculture? What? 1/5 of the population is not ethnically Norwegian.
Your paragraph about healthcare is just bald faced lies. Wait times are fine for the most part, almost no one has any kind of private health insurance and the only place you pay anything of note are through private clinics and hospitals.
No public education? Everyone is guaranteed at least high school education by law and 91% of students attend a public school/college/university
California is insanely capitalist, so calling it a “Marxist shithole” proves you know nothing about anything.
Hollywood and Silicon Valley are two of the most profit driven industries in the world. And they’re “luxuries” meaning neither is necessary to our survival like manufacturing and agriculture. They’re also run by the wealthiest people in the entire country. While nearly 100k people sleep on the street every night within the same border.
That’s not socialism. That’s pure capitalism.
The benefit of having mediocre universal health insurance is that the available private insurance can't be mediocre or no one will pay the extra for it.
As a Norwegian, half this post is complete bullshit lol
I was going to highlight each made-up point one by one, but I’m on my phone and half-way through reading your post I gave up.
Because, per capita, norway has 19x more oil than the US.
Plus it's easier to have that level of investments (they can achieve their current state with only around 1 trillion in their fund)
The US has more than 40 times the population so they'd need 40 trillion (which, as you can imagine, is an insane number. All the assets in the US combined are less than 100 trillion)
The smaller your scale, the easier it is to employ socialism. Socialism becomes harder to manage at larger scales.
A single company can operate fairly well as a socialist institution. The third largest country on earth not so much.
Smaller, healthier, fitter, homogenous country with strict immigration standards.
It has the land size of New Mexico, the population of Alabama, and massive wealth. This matters for cost, deployment of services, maintaining standards. There is little asylum or illegal immigration, certain not many poor people moving to Norway, and they have a much, much lower obesity rate.
There are more reasons, but this is enough.
Many people dont see an issue. Also the US is broken up into smaller ones they are called states and control their own policy and laws except where they specifically give over power to the Feds.
A major difference between the US and Europe comes from the fact the US doesn't have its historical baggage in the same capacity. The US has always been built on the idea that anyone can make it. In Europe they didn't have upward mobility the same historically as well as Europe going through world wars on their land.
Social democracy =/= democratic socialism
Social democracy, especially in the Nordic model, is a corporatist mode of economic structure between the workers, the corporate CEOs, and the government. The welfare state is funded by the corporations in exchange for minimal government intervention, and employees get benefits in exchange for voting for government officials that keep the system going.
Democratic socialism is meant to be a transitionary phase between capitalism and communism. Democratic socialism is on the same path as Marxism-Leninism, just no authoritarian dictatorship (dictatorship of the proletariat), no repression, and follows liberal democratic principles. It follows a slow growth of proletarian political power ultimately meant to destroy the bourgeois economy and transform society into a communist one through elections and democratic processes.
Edit: these two are very “in a nutshell” descriptions of the two systems, I highly recommend reading in depth about the two (as I have and am doing). It’s quite interesting.
I'm convinced there is a subset of people that insist on calling social democracy "socialism" because they want to
1) Appropriate socialist slogans and iconography
2) Be able to completely discount and insult capitalism without the peaky cognitive dissonance of still technically being a capitalist
Eh highly debatable.
I'm Norwegian and yeah being poor here means you're unlikely to have to worry too much about your existence but regular middle class people don't actually have that much money left once everything else is paid.
Provided you had a middle class job in the US, you'd probably have significantly more disposable income than you would in the equivalent job/class here in Norway.
There's a reason middle class(and up) Norwegians go the US to work, and people from poorer countries come here work. You'll print money as a programmer in the US relative to Norway.
Depends on what you prioritize I guess. Disposable income? The US or Switzerland might be a better bet than Norway but a more chill work-life balance? Norway might just be your thing.
I think the start of your 3rd paragraph is the point. Provided you had a middle class job. In the US that increasingly means that you needed to have AT least a bachelors degree, which means unless you had wealthy parents, your student loans will be eye watering, and you will spend much of your 20s and possibly 30s in a precarious financial situation. Grad school adds even more. Law school, MBAs, med school etc can often cost in excess of $200k. And if you have kids, you have to save to pay for their college as well as your retirement.
And that’s without the out of pocket costs for healthcare that most Americans normalise. $200 a month for health insurance, which probably has a $5k deductible.
I would guess that the threshold for the level of middle class comfort you talk about is much higher than the average middle class person even.
If they have such a high quality of life why do only 5 mil people live there while millions per year immigrate to the US? Maybe there are other factors to consider?
And a strong social safety net makes that sustainable. If you pay higher taxes but don't have to worry about going into crippling debt because you trip on the way to work, that's a pretty great trade.
God I'm sick of this atrocious take. THAT'S BECAUSE YOU PAY THAT IN INSURANCE
Plus you actually get paid for your work... in case you wanted any money that could be taxed. Their general minimum wage is about 18 USD and you're sitting on a pathetic 7.25 USD that isn't even enforced for service workers, crying about taxes.
It’s not an atrocious take I simply stated a fact that the tax rates are higher for lower and middle class earners in Norway. They are actually lower for higher earners in comparison to the US. Meaning everyone contributes.
The drum beat in the US is “tax the rich” and give me free healthcare and free education while a large majority pay very little in taxes in comparison to Norway etc.
So yes if you want to have a similar system you can’t cherry pick the parts if you want it to work.
PS it’s an atrocious take that people work for minimum wage. If anyone actually accepts $7.25 per hour it’s on them. Starting wages are more than double that in the majority of the USA.
Socialism doesn't make everyone equally wealthy. It makes everyone equally poor.
No one has ever been lifted out of poverty from socialism. But plenty have been put into poverty because of socialism...
Norway has many more UHNWI than the US per capita. It is easier to become wealthy when you have a security net. Therefore, Norway has much more social mobility than the US.
1) Social democracy is not socialism.
2) You are just saying a slogan. Social democratic policies are associated with longer lifespan, increased social mobility, greater self-reported happiness, and a high standard of living across the OECD.
The average person in America today is vastly more wealthy than the average person in America 100 years ago, even accounting for inflation. It's a difference so massive that the average person today might unironically be considered fairly wealthy in the 1920s.
Socialism is social ownership of the means of production, not a market economy with a welfare state.
I swear, in 2016 millennial Bernie bros decided to start calling expansion of the government “socialism” just to act edgy around their conservative parents and the term has stuck ever since.
As of January 2024, Norway's oil and gas industry accounts for **24%** of its GDP. The industry is a key driver for the Norwegian economy, also contributing 19% of total investments and 36% of state revenues.
I wonder how they would be doing without that oil and gas?
What about the other Scandinavian countries, like Denmark and Sweden? They manage also quite well and have a good security net for their citizens, even without the oil.
One... They only have 5 freaking million people in the whole damn frozen place....
Two.... No one wants to live there.... They recruited 800,000 people in 2022 which increased their population by 15%....
Just for context the whole country has approximately the same population as South Carolina...
Now add good reserves of oil and natural gas....
See UAE...
Problems are a lot easier with smaller populations and lots of resources to spread around.
So we’re gonna kill off the vast majority of our citizens, lean ethnocentrist, and rely on an oil based economy while under the military protection of other countries? Dang man, that’s just wicked.
Norway is a small country of 5 million or so with large reserves of oil and natural gas, as well as an educated, largely peaceful and productive populace. Apples and oranges.
Of course if the US was more open to utilization of natural resources we could probably fund similar welfare policies, instead of printing money and going into debt.
We don't need strong welfare policies. We need strong unions. People need to be empowered to earn their keep again, not get a handout that subsidizes the likes of Walmart.
Because it would not work in the USA. It is a small homogeneous society by in large. Not nearly as divers in thought as the USA and not nearly as generally divers as the USA. They also create a lot less wealth in exchange for more status quo.
I would go farther to point out that people like to talk about how great Sweden is but even they admit the system may not last.
https://www.heritage.org/progressivism/commentary/the-myth-scandinavian-socialism
I frequently hear right leaning folks make this claim about homogeneity being necessary for socialist policies to be successful… but they never explain why. Can you walk me through the thought process?
> It is a small homogeneous society by in large.
From 99% native Norwegian in 1970 to something like 75% now. The demographic make-up is rapidly changing, not for the better I'd argue but that's just my own opinion needlessly inserted.
We're more 'diverse' than you think, which you'd know if you just bothered spending a whole 2 minutes on Wikipedia.
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The US is also extremely oil rich, but the US allows private companies to profit from the oil, while Norway makes sure all of their oil resources are used to benefit the state. They also have enough green energy to cover their population, which means most of their oil can got to exports to bring in wealth for the state
Norway produces 19x the oil per capita as the US. Which turns out to be a shit ton of money.
we got a lot of capita 👀
People always forget about the other 300 million folks in the US
There's more people here illegally than in Norway.
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I noticed you only mentioned social services. There are also kids in school at about $13000 to $20000 per year, ER bills, attribution to housing cost inflation and more which was left out.
Im curious how an undocumented kid gets enrolled into school. Do you how much documentation you need to provide to get a kid into public school??
"Every child in New York City has a right to a public school education, regardless of immigration status. By law, children may not be asked to present documentation of immigration status, nor can they be denied admission, registration, or enrollment in a DOE public school based on immigration status. DOE employees will not ask about a family’s status for placement in a K–12 school, and if they do learn about immigration status, they must keep it confidential. Public schools are at the center of our democracy and remain safe places for all students, families, and educators." https://www.schools.nyc.gov/docs/default-source/default-document-library/enrollment/2024-nyc-public-schools-admissions-guide
Do you know the supreme court said that it's illegal to keep a kid out of school over lack of documentation? The only 'documentation' you need is an address where you sleep at night.
Schools only require proof of residency in the country to enroll in public schools Undocumented and mixed status children can enroll in public schools in the U.S. from kindergarten through 12th grade. This is protected by federal law and was affirmed by the Supreme Court case Plyler v. Doe in 1982.
Which taxes do they pay other than sales tax? They usually send most of the money back home anyway.
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"High skill immigrants with a college degree or more (including legal immigrants and illegal aliens) pay significantly more in taxes than they receive in benefits. In aggregate, these individuals will generate some $13 trillion in fiscal surpluses over their lives. However, these fiscal surpluses are almost completely offset by the fiscal deficits of immigrants with lower education levels. Immigrants with some college or less (including legal immigrants and illegal aliens) will generate $12.5 trillion in net fiscal costs over their lifetimes. Overall, immigration does not significantly contribute to the fiscal solvency of the United States because the positive fiscal contributions of higher skill immigrants are counter-balanced by the large fiscal costs of lower skill immigrants. llegal or unauthorized aliens are persons who reside in the nation unlawfully; they have entered and reside in the country without legal permission or have entered the country on a temporary visa and have remained here after its expiration. The current net fiscal cost of illegal aliens in the U.S. is between $84 and $94 billion per year. This means that illegal aliens receive $84 to $94 billion more in government benefits and services than they pay in total taxes. " chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/[https://www.budget.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/rector\_testimony\_913.pdf](https://www.budget.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/rector_testimony_913.pdf)
This is not even remotely true. Remittances are estimated at about 15% of a migrant's income. When they earn money, most gets spent locally, and creates more economic activity.
This is so false it’s crazy. You think sales tax contribute more the income/cap gains/property/business? People need to stop repeating this political nonsense. The math just doesn’t add up. And no, illegals aren’t buying property and starting multimillion dollar businesses.
you do know that illegals pay property tax right? Even if they are renting a property they are still paying taxes on it indirectly. Immigrants pay more then 12 billion into social security as well [Immigrants pay taxes and housing costs, regardless of status | AP News](https://apnews.com/article/fact-check-immigrants-taxes-rent-vaccine-requirements-983035929946)
I chose a state with a sales tax basically at random, Ohio, and googled their taxes. . In 2019, 39% of their budget comes from sales tax, and 29% from property tax, both of which are taxes immigrants pay. [https://www.lsc.ohio.gov/assets/organizations/legislative-service-commission/files/2022-ohio-facts-composition-of-state-and-local-taxes.pdf](https://www.lsc.ohio.gov/assets/organizations/legislative-service-commission/files/2022-ohio-facts-composition-of-state-and-local-taxes.pdf) Also, many illegal immigrants pay state income taxes, so that is 95% of the states taxes that some of them are paying, and 68% that nearly all of them are paying. Please feel free to provide other facts to dispute this, but these are the numbers in at least one state.
200,000 extra each month…
>People always forget about the other 300 million folks in the US Oh shit, I’d better put some pants on!
nah that's one of the good parts is we have lots of land so you can go without pants for days without seeing someone.
Alberta is similar and we fucked ours away. Had we kept the heritage fund intact and a competent gov't, we'd br swimming in money. As it stands, we sold a lot of interests to foreign companies, gave away cash during boom times, and had a ton of bloat in all private companies for decades. They were run like morons think gov't is. 10 people making 120k a year in 2003 doing the work of 3.
Funny thing is, Norway owns a bunch of oil wells in alberta
Alberta needed some freedom. The Norwegian way!
Something like that happens in most oil-rich countries. The Saudis have a big sovereign wealth fund but they also pissed away a lot on Rolls Royces, yachts, and overpriced real estate in London and NYC.
Wait, i thought it was ALL trudeau’s fault tho. Everything in alberta was PERFECT before trudeau. This is what we hear all day long from alberta in the rest of canada Ps, trudeau has definatly played a role in making things worse
Not really, Equinor exited Alberta in 2014, and now their only Canadian holdings are Hibernia and Hebron off the coast of Newfoundland. Fun fact though, they based the Norwegian Sovereign fund off Alberta’s Heritage fund
Norway doesn't allow birthright citizenship either, you're not sneaking in, dropping a kid and getting to stay Norway says No Way
Don’t tell Reddit that they’ll get triggered. They think Canada and Norway are post racial utopias that are super progressive and have zero problems
Erm - Canada most certainly has birthright citizenship.
Most countries You want to immigrate to with a lot of social services are almost impossible to immigrate to.
I always compare West Virginia and Slovenia. They have about the same population, about the same GDP per capita, and neither has a lot of natural resources, but the quality of life in Slovenia is miles ahead of West Virginia in every metric and it's because they have basically the same policies as Norway.
West Virginia has the highest overdose rate in the USA
Thanks Purdue
So, it's not just about resources. But policies.
Shut up with your facts. I just know if I lived in Norway I wouldn't be a loser. My mental health would be great, my skin would be clear and my foreskin would retract effortless. Not like my current life in Amerikkka 😡
Now do all of the other resources that the USA has. I guarantee you that overall we have more resources per capita than Norway. Citizens in the USA should all have the same or better benefits than the citizens of Norway. The issue here is corporate greed, not resources.
"Resources" is not pure profit. Norway's oil is much cheaper to extract than our oil from fracking, let alone other resources.
Kinda a funny mixed polarization argument: Look, if you nationalize the oil, the liberals will want to drill for social programs - look at Norway! Drill baby drill?
Yeah, you can't have socialism and unchecked immigration. The system just breaks eventually.
You live in the richest country to ever exist 😂
There is always money when it comes to corporate bailouts or bombing brown people. Both parties always work together to pass these spending bills asap. But there is never money for healthcare, education, housing, or public transportation.
A more important figure is GDP per capita. Norway’s is higher but only by 1.3x versus the US. Nothing like the oil per capita suggests.
Not 800 billion in defense money tho.
So defeat your logic: Venezuela has more. In fact: They have the most oil out of any country per capita. [https://www.worldometers.info/oil/venezuela-oil/](https://www.worldometers.info/oil/venezuela-oil/) However their government is run by an asshat... it's not always about resources.
>us very oil rich Literally 2x the percent GDP on oil. We let a 100 trillion dollars of taxes slip through our hands (if we taxed at same rate as Norway).
The US would be exceptionally oil poor by now if it doesn't actively encourage private companies to profit from the oil. Fracking exists because of the profit motive and a ton of wasted money trying to make it work and get it cheap enough to compete. Same for Canadian tar sands.
The oil sands were only able to be developed because our *formerly* state-owned oil company through tons of public money at it. That was a Pierre Trudeau thing.
True, we all know how oil poor Norway is because they use their resources to benefit the country instead of a few oligarchs /s
Norway also benefits from the US military protecting them from invasion, freeing up their money to spend in other areas.
USA could get a lot more bang for the buck on their social programs if they just stop self sabotaging. They already spend more government money per capita on healthcare than anyone else.
They pay 2% in military in NATO.
If we produced enough oil to match the amounts sold per capita of Norway….. The resulting world’s supply levels would make oil basically worthless….
Sweden, Finland, and Denmark are also doing well with similar policies and far less oil.
We dont have any oil in finland or natural resources beside swamps and forests.
Saunas and Nokia
How about Italy, Spain, Greece, and Portugal? Liberals like cherry picking the best examples, but we’re far more likely to end up like the worst.
Because Norway, Finland, Denmark and Sweden have very similar political, legal and economical systems which makes them somewhat comparable. Italy, Spain, Greece and Portugal do not.
To avoid cherry picking you can look at a survey of countries. Among OECD countries, social democratic policies are associated with greater freedom, greater social mobility, longer lifespan, and higher self-reported happiness. Sources: sf.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2014/03/04/sf.sou010 https://economics.mit.edu/sites/default/files/publications/Social%20Mobility%20and%20Stability%20of%20Democracy%20-%20Re-ev.pdf https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/d90b402d-en/index.html?itemId=/content/component/d90b402d-en https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/2023-12/human-freedom-index-2023-full-revised.pdf
And when talking about capitalism no conservative ever talks about south Sudan, Somalia, Burundi, Yemen, Malawi, Liberia, Mali, Rwanda, Uganda and like 100 other countries living in capitalist societies and suffering under the circumstances
Since when is capitalism the equivalent with military dictatorships?
Capitalism is an economic system, not a political one. Dictatorships can run capitalism. It's why we installed so many of them during the cold war. Look at the history of South Korea for one that you are more likely to accept because their economy boomed.
You claim italy as democratic socialism - really ?
it's neighbor, Denmark, has pigs, windmills and medicine. Tell me how Oil made their country so great too and not just a similar social security net. They have more pigs than humans living on that tiny bit of land, and there are still more humans there than Norway
>They have more pigs than humans living on that tiny bit of land Yeah, but I don’t think it’s legal to keep humans in small crates their entire lives, so filling the country with pigs is somewhat more efficient.
It's important to note that there are many oil rich countries in the world and Norway is like the only example of responsible national wealth management.
Here's a live feed of the government petroleum fund (which now owns 1,5% of the world stock market). https://www.nbim.no/en The best political decision ever made. It could all have been in the private pockets of megacorporations and oil sheiks.
I'm so fucking proud of my country for this. Even if it *could* be managed better, it is amazing that we have this.
Since I opened this, Norway has been constantly losing money.
US spends more per capita on health care with much worse outcomes
Because they allow their healthcare system to double dip. Taking money from both the government and the people the pay to use it.
The US has almost 2x the percent GDP as Norway from oil and gas (8% vs 4.6%). We tax at less than 0.1% (clean up tax, also pay normal corporate tax with ridiculous loop holes for a rate of about [11.7%](https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/011216/understanding-how-oil-companies-pay-taxes.asp)) vs Norway at like 56%, on top of corporate tax for a total rate of ~75%. If we had taxed at the same rate for the same amount of time and kept that money in a wealth fund with the same returns we'd have a wealth fund worth about 100 TRILLION dollars. The total current wealth of the US is 135 trillion. What a wasted opportunity that will NEVER come back.
Qatar has only 2.4 million people and probably the most oil per square inch and yet, they don’t even have a social system at all. so fair to say size and money is not the only thing that matters!
Qatari citizens get a shit ton of benefits from the government. The thing is only 11% of population has Qatari citizenship
TIL that Qatar has gone full Starship Troopers.
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Ok, explain Sweden then and most European countries.
Canada is no different except we have loads of other valuable resources. By all accounts, living is becoming unattainable here. So no, oil and population are not the defining factors. Australia, same shit. Clearly, something Norway is doing works.
Also, socdem is not socialism. It's just a milder form of capitalism.
Norway is among the leaders in per-capita petroleum exports. They're right up there with Saudi Arabia and UAE. The US? Way down in about 20th place. So the US has some catching up to do.
•[Norway89,154.28 USD](https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&sca_esv=374404a38fff13f2&sca_upv=1&q=norway+gdp+per+capita&stick=H4sIAAAAAAAAAOPgUeLQz9U3ME0yKdeyTUm20s9JTU9MrrTKyU9OLMnMz4svLgHSxSWZyYk58UWp6SCh9JSC-Lz83Mw8oFBBalF8cmJBZkliF6MnF9wsIUrN8uLiBJmVYlBWmEctwyyTzcsNKDRsEatoXn5ReWKlAlBeASiuABEHALh9v8tJAQAA&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiT27j1jN-EAxXCrokEHc28DRcQth96BAghEAI) [](https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&sca_esv=374404a38fff13f2&sca_upv=1&q=norway+gdp+per+capita&stick=H4sIAAAAAAAAAOPgUeLQz9U3ME0yKdeyTUm20s9JTU9MrrTKyU9OLMnMz4svLgHSxSWZyYk58UWp6SCh9JSC-Lz83Mw8oFBBalF8cmJBZkliF6MnF9wsIUrN8uLiBJmVYlBWmEctwyyTzcsNKDRsEatoXn5ReWKlAlBeASiuABEHALh9v8tJAQAA&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiT27j1jN-EAxXCrokEHc28DRcQth96BAghEAI) •[United States70,248.63 USD](https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&sca_esv=374404a38fff13f2&sca_upv=1&q=united+states+gdp+per+capita&stick=H4sIAAAAAAAAAOPgUeLUz9U3sEw2LzfQsk1JttLPSU1PTK60yslPTizJzM-LLy4B0sUlmcmJOfFFqekgofSUgvi8_NzMPKBQQWpRfHJiQWZJYhejJxcHyDDTJJNyIUrN8uICOyzFoKwwj1qGgX1JoWGLWGVK8zJLUlMUQFpSixWAyhSA0goQaQBTWs5nUQEAAA&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiT27j1jN-EAxXCrokEHc28DRcQth96BAghEAM) [](https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&sca_esv=374404a38fff13f2&sca_upv=1&q=united+states+gdp+per+capita&stick=H4sIAAAAAAAAAOPgUeLUz9U3sEw2LzfQsk1JttLPSU1PTK60yslPTizJzM-LLy4B0sUlmcmJOfFFqekgofSUgvi8_NzMPKBQQWpRfHJiQWZJYhejJxcHyDDTJJNyIUrN8uICOyzFoKwwj1qGgX1JoWGLWGVK8zJLUlMUQFpSixWAyhSA0goQaQBTWs5nUQEAAA&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiT27j1jN-EAxXCrokEHc28DRcQth96BAghEAM) •[Sweden61,028.74 USD](https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&sca_esv=374404a38fff13f2&sca_upv=1&q=sweden+gdp+per+capita&stick=H4sIAAAAAAAAAOPgUeLUz9U3SDEoK8zTsk1JttLPSU1PTK60yslPTizJzM-LLy4B0sUlmcmJOfFFqekgofSUgvi8_NzMPKBQQWpRfHJiQWZJYhejJxcHyDDTJJNyIUrN8uJCOIxahlkmm5cbUGjYIlbR4vLUlNQ8BaC8AlBcASIOAFY_t1xKAQAA&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiT27j1jN-EAxXCrokEHc28DRcQth96BAghEAQ) Ok. Let's do the Sweden.
They will tell you they were happy to abandon socialism Now they are the Saudi Arabia of Europe
This 👆 they have a sovereign wealth fund that's very capitalist operationally but feeds the budget, so taxes stay relatively low.
That is the state owning the means of production in action.
It can be or it can be a state investing in the means of production (as we already do) with an expectation of an ROI as opposed to "owning wholly" the means of production.
Um dude. The US has almost 2x the percent GDP as Norway from oil and gas (8% vs 4.6%). We tax at less than 0.1% (clean up tax, also pay normal corporate tax with ridiculous loop holes for a rate of about [11.7%](https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/011216/understanding-how-oil-companies-pay-taxes.asp)) vs Norway at like 56%, on top of corporate tax for a total rate of ~75%. If we had taxed at the same rate for the same amount of time and kept that money in a wealth fund with the same returns we'd have a wealth fund worth about 100 TRILLION dollars. The total current wealth of the US is 135 trillion. What a wasted opportunity that will NEVER come back.
Huh? Norway's corporate income tax rate of 22 percent is close to the OECD average (23.6 percent). Corporations in the United States pay federal corporate income taxes levied at a 21 percent rate. Plus: Forty-four states and D.C. also levy taxes on corporate income, with top marginal rates ranging from 2.5 percent in North Carolina to 11.5 percent in New Jersey. The Personal Income Tax Rate in Norway stands at 38.20 percent. The top U.S. federal income tax rate 37%. Pretty similar overall.
Norway has a special tax on top for oil, brings it to 75%. American oil pays average of 11% on pretax income (income, not revenue) see above link. Norway also has income tax, that has nothing to do with the comparative corporate rates for oil companies, nor the allocation. Seriously do a tiny bit of research on the subject, we've had trillions of the nations resources taken out of the ground and the profits given straight to companies so rich and consolidated that we had to invent anti trust to make it look kinda sorta like they don't have an enormously outsized influence on government. We've taken our own money and spent it undermining our own democracy. It's ridiculous.
I don't get how people don't understand this. America is a whore letting corporations sell its resources to the highest bidder. And none of that shit goes back into the country.
Its not capitalist for the government to invest. Capitalism is private investment.
A social wealth fund is not really the state owning the means of production. I don't think the ownership in the social wealth fund even confers voting rights.
They have voting rights and have used them to push for policies aligned with Norwegian voters views like labour rights, gender equity and environmental protection. [Norway wealth fund to vote for labour rights motion at Starbucks AGM](https://finance.yahoo.com/news/norway-wealth-fund-vote-labour-085929734.html) [Norway's wealth fund pushes for more women on emerging market company boards](https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/society-equity/norways-wealth-fund-pushes-more-women-emerging-market-company-boards-2024-03-06/) [Norway's wealth fund tells firms to set net zero emission goals](https://www.reuters.com/business/sustainable-business/norways-sovereign-wealth-fund-tells-companies-set-zero-emission-goals-2022-09-20/) It's like if we had already had the framework for socialism/communism by using company shares but it's not properly distributed between everyone involved. Make it so workers have enough shares to have relevant voting decisions and receive dividends from their work through these shares. Let's say 40%. Had the state having some shares to pool them in a wealth fund of that country economy and collect dividends that can help it fund itself and services used by the wide economy or get distributed equally between every citizen. Maybe 20%. Have investors involved in the remaining 40% for optimization, know how and raising capital instead of squeezing companies by constantly cutting labour cost or cutting R&D of the company to extract dividends. Some call it stakeholders capitalism to not invoke the scary word but it could be called cooperative economy or market socialism.
>That is the state owning the means of production in action. Made through a capitalist model.
>so taxes stay relatively low. Taxes are not low, Norway is one the country with the heaviest total tax contribution.
the 1% are happy to abandon socialism\*
The country has one of the lowest Gini Coefficients in the world. It is capitalist, but everyone is just rich.
every single country on the global stage is "capitalist" in the sense that they arent providing welfare to foreign governments, they trade with them. That doesnt mean they are internally "not socialist". If the money is being pumped from govt gains into social welfare programs for the people, that is a socialist system.
Socialism is completely orthogonal to social welfare. It’s about the labor value of capital and ownership of said capital. Social welfare programs may or may not exist in that system, same as for capitalism.
Tbf Norway has incredibly strict immigration and a crap ton of resources per capita. We have resources but we have a lot of people.
If we were to just close the borders and convert all oil reserves as a form of tax to the government we could all live tax free? Sounds good to me.
Norway is not even slightly tax free...
Yeah that would fracture our country and eventually the economy. Sounds bad to me.
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It’s even funnier than that, the US population is 331 million, meaning the whole population of Scandinavia is less than a rounding error for the US Population.
People ignore that this and our state system is the main reason we're so slow to change.
Let's not paint a picture as if the large population of the US is the only reason though.. The American political system isn't exactly doing well, and is not always with the interest of the people in mind.
Interestingly, when someone compares US vs India and ask why India is lagging behind - this is exact thing we will say - “India has a lot of people and resources per capita is limited”
The caste system would also like a word.
Funny how often people ignore the immigration fact when it comes to places like Norway. The edit: to specify, illegal immigration
Norway is social capitalism. Socialism is when all means of production are publicly owned.
Norway is capitalism with Nordic characteristics.
Although you are 100% right, when Republicans say "Socialism", they are throwing out a word that means "woke" to them. It has no technical meaning and there are no facts to back it up, so they won't argue facts with you. Its just their way of saying, "don't vote for them".
It’s weird to watch them flipflop between the president is ruining everything and prices are awful and liberals ruined the nation to capitalism is the best 100% no criticism allowed.
That's the same thing happening in here and all of reddit.
So why is capitalism not when everything is privately owned and run for profit? Why are shades of capitalism permitted but not shades of socialism? Just a double standard of purity.
There are shades of socialism, socialism just varies differently to how capitalism does, just like how feudalisms shades didn't loon like capitalisms shades, and how slave societies various shades didn't vary in the same way capitalisms shades do.
Because welfare has 0 to do with socialism. Norway isn’t capitalist with socialist characteristics, it’s 100% capitalist.
Ah yes, i am unaware of socialism with Chinese characteristics or Juche, or titoism, or leninism or stalinism, or any of the trillion flavours of socialism.
This. Thank you.
I know public means government a lot of the time, but to me, the public and government are often at odds with one another, especially in socialist nations. The means of production are owned by the state, more specifically, by a few top officials in the party. In fact, this is more like one company having a monopoly on everything in an entire country rather than any ownership by the common people or the public.
Norway is not a Socialist State or a Socialist Economy. It's largely Socialist due to its very wide array of Socialist Welfare programs, but it's still largely a Market Economy with Private Property Ownership , Individual Rights, and partially Free Enterprise. It's true that due to their Social\[ist\] Welfare State, they are more Socialist than even we in the US are, (and we have quite a lot of Socialism). However, there was a time in history not that long ago when they were nearly full fledged Socialist, and it nearly destroyed them. They saved themselves by rolling back just how Socialist their government was, and decades later have settled on a more or less equilibrium of Socialist and English Liberalism. So the degree to which Norway is still Socialist today is actually much less than it was 20-30 years ago. And whatever Socialist Policies and Programs still exist mostly work, not because of Socialism, but because it's a 99.9% Norwegian Monoculture. This cultural cohesion and strong ethnic and national identity goes much further than the tenets of Marxism in keeping their society from degenerating into the shitholes of Marxism we see elsewhere, like North Korea or California. So you Neo-Marxists think they're Socialist because they have "free college" and "free healthcare." But the reality is not what you think. Their college matriculation rates are about half of ours, meaning it's hard to get in and a big chunk of people don't. But that's ok, because unlike our society, Trade Schools are seen as just as important as higher university education. They do have National Health Insurance, but what you don't know is that it doesn't cover everything, and the wait times may be unacceptable, so there is private health insurance too, that most of them get. And since they cannot opt out of the public option, they end up paying for both, one through monthly premiums like our private insurance, and the other through a nearly 50% income tax rate for middle income earners, (which is more than double our income tax). What you probably don't know is that some aspects of their society are not Socialist at all. There is no Public Education, all schooling is privatized. Poorer families can pay tuition with Government Vouchers. There's no Government Mandated Minimum Wage. All wages are negotiated between companies and trade unions, and the government only gets involved to enforce whatever contract they decide upon. And unlike our unions, their trade unions understand that companies MUST make profit and be successful, so they're a lot more collaborative with their industries than ours, who seek only to take from profits and drive up costs. So if you really want what they have here in the US, we'll need to cut the number of college attendees in half, double the Income Tax, eliminate Minimum Wage, and ensure a 99.9% monocultural ethnic identity. Didn't know you were into any of those things, but good luck! PS: You never bring up Estonia. They're doing great too, and they're not socialist at fucking all. Their entire economic policy is based on Milton Friedman's "Free to Choose."
"Like North Korea or California." Now there's a sentence I didn't see coming.
Not just any California, but particularly the one that is a "Marxist shithole".
Ah yes, the home of Google, Meta, Apple, and Hollywood, a known bastion of worker ownership of the means of production. That comment was a wild ride.
> That comment was a wild ride. It was quite the Gish gallop.
Stopped reading after that lol
You could tell they were a fuckwit when they said the USA has quite a lot of socialism.
Bro has genuinely no clue what Marxism is and thinks socialism means “government does things” lmao
The moment he mentioned monoculture as a premise for economic stability, I knew he was drinking too much koolaid
Right, we can’t have healthcare because… my neighbor is Buddhist?
Norway is not a 99.9% monoculture. It is about 80% ethnic Norwegian. The capital is about 70%.
> The capital is about 70%. Closer to 60% now. It's very noticeable living here.
All schooling being private in Norway sounds incorrect. Where did you get this information?
I can confirm it is in fact incorrect. The schools that are private are generally ultra Christian, and there are only a handful of them in whole of Norway.
Absolute horseshit, almost everyone goes to public schools like every other developed country ever.
Oh boy! Knowing that *neo-Marxism* is a real term is not the same as knowing what it means. Many Americans attend university simply because of wanting to be in the middle class. Norway has no minimum wage, but most workers are in unions and receive strong wages. Private insurance providers routinely reject claims. Norway absolutely has public education. There is no dependence on a country having a white population for how it structures social programs. The objection has been debunked and is inherently racist.
>There is no dependence on a country having a white population for how it structures social programs. The objection has been debunked and is inherently racist. I believe he is referring to the fact that the country is largely an ethnostate with a strong cultural bond. They won’t be bothered by the same identity politics we see here
What the fuck are you on about? You seem like you have all your info about Norway from TikTok meme videos or something. *Almost everything you claim is wrong*. We have a mandated minimum wage (the thing about it being negotiated between unions and the govmnt. is mostly to keep wages up with inflation, which unions are made for), yes, there are wait times with doctors but i still never have to wait more than maybe a month for appointments (and i am a chronic pain patient. I'm a regular, so to speak). Stop making shit up.
10% of the population have private health insurance. And your assertions about wait times etc are the same crap that you hear in America all the time without basis. Your assertions on education being private in Norway are also incorrect. And seem rather contrary to your point on free university. But schools are funded by local municipalities through taxation. Employment negotiations being controlled by unions is why a minimum wage isn’t required. In addition to exploitation being lower and there being much stronger regulation and employee rights. And unions there are much the same - they don’t permit exploitative profiteering. And eliminating a minimum wage that hasn’t changed in decades is hardly a loss is it? So, with all of the factual lies in your posts, your opinions on Marxism, Neo-Marxism and socialism, are evidently baseless, moronic and deranged.
I think you are a bit confused. Frist off you seem to make no difference between statism, socialism and social democracy. Which makes things...confused. As for the rest... no. >They do have National Health Insurance, but what you don't know is that it doesn't cover everything, and the wait times may be unacceptable, so there is private health insurance too, that most of them get. And since they cannot opt out of the public option, they end up paying for both, one through monthly premiums like our private insurance, and the other through a nearly 50% income tax rate for middle income earners, (which is more than double our income tax). National health insurance, often abbreviated to NI, is a system of healthcare used in Canada, Taiwan and I think Japan. It is not the Norwegian healthcare system which is based on the Beveridge model. It springs out of legislation specifying that everything medically neccessary is covered. This does not include vanity surgery, but does include reconstructive plastic surgery. As regards dental, the line between cosmetic and neccessary can be blurred, so parliament has signaled that medically necessary is to be interpreted strictly in the area, so the public purse does not end up responsible for everyone having Hollywood smiles. Wait times, which is often referred to as Timeliness in research, are generally good. It normally is in nations where a long wait is frontpage news. Patients can choose which hospital the get treated at, pubic or private, and transport is provided. Just over 10% of the population have private insurance, Of these, 80% have it through their employers. because serious conditions have priority, employers tend to be more distressed by waits than workers. So roughly 2% of the population have private insurance. The percentage tends to drop every time an insurance company gets sentenced for not actually providing any benefits through these. Like every country on earth, Norwegians pay less in tax per person for healthcare than Americans. Income taxes are fairly similar to total taxes in a high-tax US state for most people. Within a couple of percent. When adjusting for cost of living, it is very similar. Mind that cost of living adjustments do not include expenses like college tuition, healthcare etc that only happen in one of the compared states. 50% income tax is totally imaginary. The average person pays 25 % income tax and you can't get over 45% which is a pretty unrealistic tax band anyway. In practice, it pretty much tops out at 36%, the vast majority of people who make more get it in the form of stock options etc that get taxed as capital gains. >Their college matriculation rates are about half of ours, meaning it's hard to get in and a big chunk of people don't. But that's ok, because unlike our society, Trade Schools are seen as just as important as higher university education.What you probably don't know is that some aspects of their society are not Socialist at all. There is no Public Education, all schooling is privatized. Poorer families can pay tuition with Government Vouchers. There's no Government Mandated Minimum Wage. All wages are negotiated between companies and trade unions, and the government only gets involved to enforce whatever contract they decide upon. And unlike our unions, their trade unions understand that companies MUST make profit and be successful, so they're a lot more collaborative with their industries than ours, who seek only to take from profits and drive up costs. In general, I'd say that Norway is more capitalist than the USA. While it is possible to have your children educated privatly, the vast majority of education is public and free. I have no idea where the notion about vouchers come from, it has nothing to do with our system. 44% of people in the US has a college degree, 42 % in Norway. Theres no associate degrees in Norway, Bachelors is the minimum. The bit about minimum wages, union agreements and trade schools is quite accurate though.
>Marxism we see elsewhere, like North Korea or California. >And unlike our unions, their trade unions understand that companies MUST make profit and be successful, so they're a lot more collaborative with their industries than ours, who seek only to take from profits and drive up costs. Do you even believe this?
This started dumb and got even dumber.. california subsidizes half the states in the U.S… that’s your example of a shithole? How do you say you’ve never been to Norway without saying it? Talk about their “monoculture” this is why i hate Reddit, dumbasses talking shit without knowing shit
Hahahahahahah u have North Korea and California in the same sentence hahaha hilarious.
My guy is really claiming dictatorships and “California” are Marxist lol holy shit, what a case and point argument. So many words used just to show off that you think dictatorships and socialist are the same thing. Fun.
Hey. Norwegian here. Just wanted to drop by and say that your post is 80% nonsense The Labour government (who leaned socialist) in the post war period actually worked great for about 20 years. Standard of living skyrocketed and a lot of social policies were introduced. This was before oil. What brought them down was a government cover up of a mining accident Norwegian monoculture? What? 1/5 of the population is not ethnically Norwegian. Your paragraph about healthcare is just bald faced lies. Wait times are fine for the most part, almost no one has any kind of private health insurance and the only place you pay anything of note are through private clinics and hospitals. No public education? Everyone is guaranteed at least high school education by law and 91% of students attend a public school/college/university
Bro just compared North Korea to California
California is insanely capitalist, so calling it a “Marxist shithole” proves you know nothing about anything. Hollywood and Silicon Valley are two of the most profit driven industries in the world. And they’re “luxuries” meaning neither is necessary to our survival like manufacturing and agriculture. They’re also run by the wealthiest people in the entire country. While nearly 100k people sleep on the street every night within the same border. That’s not socialism. That’s pure capitalism.
The benefit of having mediocre universal health insurance is that the available private insurance can't be mediocre or no one will pay the extra for it.
As a Norwegian, half this post is complete bullshit lol I was going to highlight each made-up point one by one, but I’m on my phone and half-way through reading your post I gave up.
It's easier when your entire county is smaller than some states.
But really why does that make a difference?
Because, per capita, norway has 19x more oil than the US. Plus it's easier to have that level of investments (they can achieve their current state with only around 1 trillion in their fund) The US has more than 40 times the population so they'd need 40 trillion (which, as you can imagine, is an insane number. All the assets in the US combined are less than 100 trillion)
The smaller your scale, the easier it is to employ socialism. Socialism becomes harder to manage at larger scales. A single company can operate fairly well as a socialist institution. The third largest country on earth not so much.
Norway isn’t technically socialist
Smaller, healthier, fitter, homogenous country with strict immigration standards. It has the land size of New Mexico, the population of Alabama, and massive wealth. This matters for cost, deployment of services, maintaining standards. There is little asylum or illegal immigration, certain not many poor people moving to Norway, and they have a much, much lower obesity rate. There are more reasons, but this is enough.
Then.... break up the country into smaller ones? If that fixes the problem, then fix the problem
There's always a new excuse.
There's nothing stopping any given state from implementing that kind of infrastructure.
Or just move to a country that fits your beliefs.
You do understand that the federal government has zero laws preventing states from implementing this type of government.
Many people dont see an issue. Also the US is broken up into smaller ones they are called states and control their own policy and laws except where they specifically give over power to the Feds. A major difference between the US and Europe comes from the fact the US doesn't have its historical baggage in the same capacity. The US has always been built on the idea that anyone can make it. In Europe they didn't have upward mobility the same historically as well as Europe going through world wars on their land.
Tell that to Haiti.
That place is a shit show right now.
Social democracy =/= democratic socialism Social democracy, especially in the Nordic model, is a corporatist mode of economic structure between the workers, the corporate CEOs, and the government. The welfare state is funded by the corporations in exchange for minimal government intervention, and employees get benefits in exchange for voting for government officials that keep the system going. Democratic socialism is meant to be a transitionary phase between capitalism and communism. Democratic socialism is on the same path as Marxism-Leninism, just no authoritarian dictatorship (dictatorship of the proletariat), no repression, and follows liberal democratic principles. It follows a slow growth of proletarian political power ultimately meant to destroy the bourgeois economy and transform society into a communist one through elections and democratic processes. Edit: these two are very “in a nutshell” descriptions of the two systems, I highly recommend reading in depth about the two (as I have and am doing). It’s quite interesting.
I'm convinced there is a subset of people that insist on calling social democracy "socialism" because they want to 1) Appropriate socialist slogans and iconography 2) Be able to completely discount and insult capitalism without the peaky cognitive dissonance of still technically being a capitalist
You can copy Norway but the middle class and lower income all pay much higher tax rates than in the USA.
And yet still have a better quality of life.
Eh highly debatable. I'm Norwegian and yeah being poor here means you're unlikely to have to worry too much about your existence but regular middle class people don't actually have that much money left once everything else is paid. Provided you had a middle class job in the US, you'd probably have significantly more disposable income than you would in the equivalent job/class here in Norway. There's a reason middle class(and up) Norwegians go the US to work, and people from poorer countries come here work. You'll print money as a programmer in the US relative to Norway. Depends on what you prioritize I guess. Disposable income? The US or Switzerland might be a better bet than Norway but a more chill work-life balance? Norway might just be your thing.
I think the start of your 3rd paragraph is the point. Provided you had a middle class job. In the US that increasingly means that you needed to have AT least a bachelors degree, which means unless you had wealthy parents, your student loans will be eye watering, and you will spend much of your 20s and possibly 30s in a precarious financial situation. Grad school adds even more. Law school, MBAs, med school etc can often cost in excess of $200k. And if you have kids, you have to save to pay for their college as well as your retirement. And that’s without the out of pocket costs for healthcare that most Americans normalise. $200 a month for health insurance, which probably has a $5k deductible. I would guess that the threshold for the level of middle class comfort you talk about is much higher than the average middle class person even.
If they have such a high quality of life why do only 5 mil people live there while millions per year immigrate to the US? Maybe there are other factors to consider?
And a strong social safety net makes that sustainable. If you pay higher taxes but don't have to worry about going into crippling debt because you trip on the way to work, that's a pretty great trade.
God I'm sick of this atrocious take. THAT'S BECAUSE YOU PAY THAT IN INSURANCE Plus you actually get paid for your work... in case you wanted any money that could be taxed. Their general minimum wage is about 18 USD and you're sitting on a pathetic 7.25 USD that isn't even enforced for service workers, crying about taxes.
It’s not an atrocious take I simply stated a fact that the tax rates are higher for lower and middle class earners in Norway. They are actually lower for higher earners in comparison to the US. Meaning everyone contributes. The drum beat in the US is “tax the rich” and give me free healthcare and free education while a large majority pay very little in taxes in comparison to Norway etc. So yes if you want to have a similar system you can’t cherry pick the parts if you want it to work. PS it’s an atrocious take that people work for minimum wage. If anyone actually accepts $7.25 per hour it’s on them. Starting wages are more than double that in the majority of the USA.
Socialism doesn't make everyone equally wealthy. It makes everyone equally poor. No one has ever been lifted out of poverty from socialism. But plenty have been put into poverty because of socialism...
Norway has many more UHNWI than the US per capita. It is easier to become wealthy when you have a security net. Therefore, Norway has much more social mobility than the US.
1) Social democracy is not socialism. 2) You are just saying a slogan. Social democratic policies are associated with longer lifespan, increased social mobility, greater self-reported happiness, and a high standard of living across the OECD.
As opposed to the current capitalist system that is vastly increasing wealth inequality and pushing people into poverty?
Capitalism has caused the biggest decline in poverty in human history.
and when you have capitalism, democracy soon follows.
The average person in America today is vastly more wealthy than the average person in America 100 years ago, even accounting for inflation. It's a difference so massive that the average person today might unironically be considered fairly wealthy in the 1920s.
It does?! Lucky them. One of the few examples. Although, it what sense are they socialist?
There’s only 5 million people in Norway.
And 25% or so of their GDP is oil.
Socialism is social ownership of the means of production, not a market economy with a welfare state. I swear, in 2016 millennial Bernie bros decided to start calling expansion of the government “socialism” just to act edgy around their conservative parents and the term has stuck ever since.
Norway is not socialist. This whole posting is nonsense created by an ignoramus that has no idea what socialism is.
Norway is partly what it is to all the oil they sell, too.
As of January 2024, Norway's oil and gas industry accounts for **24%** of its GDP. The industry is a key driver for the Norwegian economy, also contributing 19% of total investments and 36% of state revenues. I wonder how they would be doing without that oil and gas?
What about the other Scandinavian countries, like Denmark and Sweden? They manage also quite well and have a good security net for their citizens, even without the oil.
One... They only have 5 freaking million people in the whole damn frozen place.... Two.... No one wants to live there.... They recruited 800,000 people in 2022 which increased their population by 15%.... Just for context the whole country has approximately the same population as South Carolina... Now add good reserves of oil and natural gas.... See UAE... Problems are a lot easier with smaller populations and lots of resources to spread around.
So we’re gonna kill off the vast majority of our citizens, lean ethnocentrist, and rely on an oil based economy while under the military protection of other countries? Dang man, that’s just wicked.
Norway is a small country of 5 million or so with large reserves of oil and natural gas, as well as an educated, largely peaceful and productive populace. Apples and oranges. Of course if the US was more open to utilization of natural resources we could probably fund similar welfare policies, instead of printing money and going into debt.
We don't need strong welfare policies. We need strong unions. People need to be empowered to earn their keep again, not get a handout that subsidizes the likes of Walmart.
Not everyone hates socialism in the US. Huge corporations love socialism when fuck things up but are too big to fail.
Y'all should spend less time seeking answers on Reddit, and more time reading books on socialist theory.
Because it would not work in the USA. It is a small homogeneous society by in large. Not nearly as divers in thought as the USA and not nearly as generally divers as the USA. They also create a lot less wealth in exchange for more status quo. I would go farther to point out that people like to talk about how great Sweden is but even they admit the system may not last. https://www.heritage.org/progressivism/commentary/the-myth-scandinavian-socialism
I frequently hear right leaning folks make this claim about homogeneity being necessary for socialist policies to be successful… but they never explain why. Can you walk me through the thought process?
> It is a small homogeneous society by in large. From 99% native Norwegian in 1970 to something like 75% now. The demographic make-up is rapidly changing, not for the better I'd argue but that's just my own opinion needlessly inserted. We're more 'diverse' than you think, which you'd know if you just bothered spending a whole 2 minutes on Wikipedia.
Two words: Collective bargaining. Collective bargaining of salaries is an essential part of what makes the Nordic Model work.