worth noting how norway is rich off of oil
True and the Nordics have plenty of poverty themselves once people look closer.
(This is just saying it exists, nothing more)
Worth noting that most of the time oil (newly discovered natural resources really)makes a country poorer than richer. See Venezuela and such.
So good on Norway to not give in to unbridled corruption and out that money on a public fund to make its own citizen wealthy
Well yes, Norway’s leader wasn’t assassinated by the US, followed by sanctions and throwing money and weapons at militant factions. I wonder why…
This is bad analysis. Natural resources don’t make countries poorer, they make the US/UK/France/Spain/Italy invade you.
Libya, rich in oil, was the richest country in Africa (and highest Human Development Index) until the west bombed it and triggered a civil war. Iran was on the way to use its oil for its own profits by nationalizing it under the democratically elected leftist government of Mosaddeq until it got blockaded and couped by MI6+CIA and a corrupt monarch got reinstated. Venezuela took millions of people out of poverty until US sanctions came in an attempt to kill the socialist government and put millions through hardship. Saudi Arabia, having a government very cozy with the US, gets away with no US coups, but has 70% of the population being effectively slaves.
US billionaires:
“Wait, you mean to say that we can keep our current quality of life, dabble in our little space projects, and that those we employ won’t suffer???”
“Lol naw fuck that.”
Exactly. The cruelty is the point. They enjoy making people suffer.
And this is America right now:
Housing and food - yes, be angry that there’s no money for that.
But healthcare? Money is not the issue - US healthcare, yes the precious private healthcare, is already getting a ridiculous 16% of the federal budget. For context - their military gets around 4%!
The money is already in the system, it’s the system itself that must be changed and made to work for the general public instead of shareholders.
I honestly don’t think the problem is that Capitalist’s don’t understand that concept; they very much do.
They also understand that the money for raising that floor would likely come from taxes on them; and so keeping the floor low means that they can keep even more profit.
It’s not a lack of understanding. It’s pure unadulterated evil.
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The reason social democracy doesn’t work is because it doesn’t change the power structure. It’s treating a symptom and not the root cause. By leaving the root cause untouched, the symptoms will always come back.
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Eh, no reason to discard the idea of putting a ceiling on the rich. Even if you took away all of the money people had that was over 1 billion dollars, that wouldn’t cause any of those people to suffer.
It would cause them to move to a country without such regulation. Maybe somewhere in Africa or Southeast Asia, or South America. Though maybe there they lose a bunch of their money to corruption so overall it’s a win.
This what they so to literally every positive economic policy ever discussed and yet every one of those places still has rich people and overinflated companies. Maybe we should stop believing their lies?
If that were true, they would have already done it.
They scream about taxes and such, but they know that they are in the very best country in the world to get super wealthy. It’s relatively easy to get access to money, systemic corruption is relatively low, and legal bribery is build into the system. The government is literally based on Capitalism.
Sure, they threaten to leave if their billion dollars is threatened with a 1% increase in taxes, but they won’t, because they know that the American economic system is what gave them the billion dollars in the first place. They’re just being whiney little bitches.
These people will lie to you to make you help them get what they want, at YOUR expense. You aren’t obligated to believe them, or help them.
If billionaires decide to leave the country then the factories and businesses run by workers producing the billions they made will remain. You can’t pick up a building and take it with you.
It’s exceedingly rare that they actually do this because they don’t want to live in a third-world country. The irony, ofc, is that their actions are turning the U.S. into one.
The issue is a bit more… circular than that.
Certain things, certain ventures, need more money than that. And in a free, capitalist society you want people to be able to achieve such goals and ventures.
Problem is, once you pool that wealth into a company (the very meaning of the word, like companion, meaning “together”, or more literally “with others, in a multitude”), imbalances will occur. What if you start it out as a group of 5, each putting in a billion, then the company, without employees, becomes successful, but due to how it worked out, one person was the main brain behind the success so they get a bigger share? Suddenly the company is worth 25 billion, 15bn belonging to the genius, and the rest having 2.5bn stake. How do you regulate that?
Also what if that money is truly for operating costs, because this company is setting up a brand new town, so they’re literally paying dozens of construction crews, establishing shops and whatnot for people to use once they move in, and so on? Do you just take any excess wealth away?
Or do you let them continue operating knowing full well that someone in the company will try to use the operational funds as their personal bank account?
The idea of a wealth limit in an optimal society is good, but in our current imperfect crap, it’s never going to work, because it will put limits to what we can achieve in general.
Mind you I do agree that billionaires shouldn’t exist and should be taxed out of existence but that’s not done with a wealth ceiling.
15bn belonging to the genius
Oof.
Anyway…
The regulation part is absurdly easy: they get a tax bill, they sell their shares, they pay the tax bill.
Operating costs don’t have anything to do with personal wealth. The company pays the operating costs. If the company’s revenue is greater than its costs, it pays dividends or reinvests and in theory, the stock prices goes up. See above.
The problem isn’t the logistics: point gun, take money. That’s pretty straightforward. The problem is ramifications. If billionaires can no longer grow their wealth, what would happen? Well, for one their control over these companies would wane. If Musk can’t own more than a billion, then he’d have to sell a bunch of stock, which means he would have less control over the board, and thus less control over decision-making. But is that such a bad thing? Are the skills and personality that cause a company to go from zero -> public the same ones you want once the company has grown to a large size? Idk, maybe ask Zuckerberg about Oculus Rift and the Metaverse.
I don’t think anyone actually knows what would happen. But we do have a lot of data on what happens if you significantly increase the marginal tax rates for upper income brackets, and it sure seems to benefit society as a whole, but depends on what outcomes you’re targeting. And that doesn’t actually target the ~900 billionaires in the United States because most of them earn money through capital gains rather than regular income.
Man, so interesting. Why do we have to pay those workers to build something that society needs? Is it because the workers need to eat? Why are the workers starving? Is it because the food they need is locked away in a hoard of wealth that only gets distributed by people who own the hoard? Why won’t they just feed people? Oh they only feed people if it means they’ll make a profit?
Hmm. How does a system this cruel stick around? What’s that? 90% of the wealth of the world is owned by a vanishingly small number of people who will only deign to feed people if it makes them a profit?
Man. Real “imperfection” you got there. I’m sure we can fix it with some reforms though once we learn more about economics…
Companies shouldn’t be creating towns, period. If we need new cities, their locations and forms should be chosen by the people. By elections. Not by some lone asshole whose only urban planning qualification is that he happens to have a large pile of money.
Towns were just an example of scale - a more realistic example would be, albeit futuristic, is whatever space-faring vessels we’ll build, and I don’t mean Musk and his rocket toys he keeps blowing up, I mean actual interplanetary and deep space ships, which will cost about the same to build as a small town.
Do you want the right to building those to be retained by the government only? Or would you prefer if the right people with the appropriate resources could do it too?
The billionaires ARE the right… they’re the ones with all the money to be pushing those right-wing narratives and the ones that profit most from the success of those narratives. Mussolini himself admitted that Corporatism was a more fitting name for his ideology than Fascism, because it is a merging of the state and corporate power. If the corporations and billionaires didn’t privately capture all those billions of dollars, what, do you think that wealth would just evaporate? No! It’s us doing all the work and making all the sacrifices, we should have control over the profit we generate and a say in what we are willing to sacrifice for it!!
Whatever spacefaring vessels are going to be built should be built at the behest of the people, for the interests of the people. Not by and for whatever person is able to lie, cheat, and steal the most wealth out of our hands. What is the point of building a rocket if all it’s going to do for us is generate another few billion dollars for one guy, who already has more money than god, at everyone else’s expense?? It’s our cake, we are the ones who spilled our blood sweat and tears over it, and we’re gonna just give it away to a guy that’s pinky-promising to drop some crumbs behind him? Fuck that!
Repeat after me: THE INTERESTS OF BILLIONAIRES ARE INCOMPATIBLE WITH THOSE OF THE PEOPLE.
no reason to discard the idea of putting a ceiling on the rich.
There is a very good reason to discard the idea of assigning an arbitrary ‘maximum wealth’, two actually:
- it’s effectively impossible to actually enforce
- it will cost us more to try to enforce it, than we will gain in revenue
It would be tremendously expensive resource-wise, logistically, to even reliably determine if one has reached that ceiling (net worth figures for individuals that you see in the media are guesses, not the result of actual auditing), much less calculate with any degree of certainty how far over the ceiling someone is, and that ‘research/enforcement cost’ is practically certain to completely cancel out (and then some) any potential added revenue, especially because it’s also trivially easy to circumvent by creating debt, etc.
- it will cost us more to try to enforce it, than we will gain in revenue
That sounds to me like an assertion that has no basis in reality.
That would most likely be because you are ignorant of when it has already literally happened in the past, in other nations.
On multiple occasions in multiple countries, wealth taxes primarily aimed at the wealthiest demographic have been tried, and then repealed because overall tax revenue literally decreased as a result. There is a reason the vast majority of countries that have implemented such taxes have either since repealed them, or ‘loosened’ them such that they’re no longer primarily aimed at said demographic, and have become a much more ‘typical’ tax that the middle class pays.
This is why the Zucmann taxation model is so hyped tbh. I doubt you haven’t heard of it?
Norwegian here: the floor is getting more and faulty and it is dependent on the imperial mode of living generally and oil and arms exports specifically
Didint you guys just find one of the biggest rare earth minerals deposit in the world?
The issue with this is that there’s plenty of rare earth minerals (they’re not rare) all around the world, it’s the refining process that is expensive and extremely polluting.
Doesn’t matter if Norway found decades worth of supply, when nobody but China is willing to build the processing plants. And China has more than enough rare earth mineral supplies themselves.
Hard to say. Current political view seem to be that EU wants to get rid of dependancy on china and great way to get free is to start mining our own.
There is pretty large deposits in Sweden, Finland and Norway so one effiecient, central refining plant could be churning virtually limitless amounts of materials, if only there would be enough funding to get the ball rolling. (Before anybody says i know Norway is not part of european union, but it is part of european economic area and part of EFTA) France already has a refining plant so the tech knowledge is already found inside the EU.
The issue is that nobody has found a way to refine it in a way that isn’t extremely polluting without the cost being extremely excessive and making it entirely pointless.
We could mine as much as we want, but the only country OK with refining this stuff is China. Unless we solve the issue of refining this in a relatively clean way at a somewhat competitive price, no refining will ever be set up in Europe.
It’s not as perfect as this screenshot portrays though:)
Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good
It’s pretty good now but the wrong people in the governments of European countries are trying to ruin it. Yes, it’s better here in Europe but there is A LOT of room for improvement.
That last line nails it: it doesn’t cap success, it just makes sure failure isn’t catastrophic.
But that’s one of the primary tenants of conservatism! What will conservatives do if people are allowed to continue living after they fail?
“doesn’t put a ceiling on wealth”
eeeeehh. maybe we fucking should?
increased privatisation is happening all over the Nordics. I don’t know how much in Norway compared to here in Finland, but being in my fourth decade I can definitely see it happening and intensely. I can’t get a fucking public dentist anymore. Hell, children aren’t given free dental care anymore.
The whole point is that the floor is the important thing. In Scandinavian countries, they have a fairly firm upper bound. But they don’t suffer when people above that upper bound flee to avoid taxes
The critical part is the lower bound
In Scandinavian countries, they have
Sounds like you don’t actually live here.
We don’t have a “firm boundary” on people being rich. We just don’t have multi-billionaires. Or if we do, they’re the silent type, not the Musk/Bezos type. And even those are pretty different.
But like, how many multi-billionaires do you know from like Minnesota, Louisiana, Oregon & Oklahoma?
The progressive taxation we have is for income, not capital gains. So essentially you can never get rich by working, but if you’re just profiting from having a lot of capital (renting properties etc, even airbnb, and tons of other ways for rich people to shift their income from “labour income” to capital gains), then you have a flat 30% tax rate. And if you’re actually a billionaire, you’d just shift it all to a tax haven to avoid even the 30%.
Sure, yeah, I agree there’s a certain type of bottom — insofar that we don’t allow people to die to starvation or the elements — but that’s a fucking low bar, don’t you think?
I bet you’re one of those people who actually believe Finland is the happiest country in the world. (It’s like North Koreans talking about freedom lol.)
Jesus Christ, you have no idea…
Our ultra-wealthy pay literally nothing in taxes. They take out loans against their holdings, and when they do sell they use losses on paper to offset their gains, so they get away with paying nothing
And most of ours fly under the radar too. There’s around 300 resorts and compounds worldwide where the billionaires live their social lives away from cameras, not counting their more personal compounds
We do let people die of starvation and to the elements. In fact, we regularly have fights over if poor children deserve to be fed, and the results recently have been “no”
Lately, we’ve been criminalizing homelessness to put a capstone on decades of regularly tearing down whatever shelter they manage to cobble together.
Hell, a church got sued for letting homeless people shelter during a cold snap. People get arrested and charged for feeding the homeless in some places
And don’t get me started on medical care… It’s literally worse than you could imagine. You wouldn’t believe me even if I sugar coated it
I’m sure your life isn’t perfect, but have no idea how bad it’s gotten over here. I’d kill for a system as imperfect as the one you take for granted
You probably think I’m exaggerating about all this, but I’m really not. Luckily the administration is incompetent, because otherwise we’d be neck deep in a genocide right now. Instead, both of our political parties have settled on mass death, just so long as it’s indirect
Sheesh I hate it when Americans are like “you have no idea”.
Yes, we do. We have the internet here as well and you can’t really avoid hearing about American shit.
Why would you think I don’t know what a tax-haven when I specifically mentioned that any “proper” billionaires can get around paying even the 30%. And that’s private citizens. Google is equally a tax-avoiding scumbag company for us Nordics as it is for you. There’s just so many laws the extremely wealthy corps and individuals can use to avoid paying anything. Google’s tax rate is literally zero.
We do let people die of starvation and to the elements
Yes, we know. Hence me explicitly mentioning we don’t?
Lately, we’ve been criminalizing homelessness
And that’s clear here as well, despite there being very few homeless and practically none of them live on the street. For some 9 months at least it’s mostly too cold to sleep outside. Yet the silly hostile architecture for benches and whatnot has pervaded into the Nordics as well.
We don’t need it, but they’re still there. So there are people here working on getting rid of even the most basic securities that allow us to function like this. Also, I’m on the same latitude as Juneau, Alaska, about. And I’m in the very SW corner of Finland, on the level of Stockholm.
Does Alaska have a large homeless population? I doubt anything like in the States where the winters are milder?
People get arrested and charged for feeding the homeless in some places
I’ve seen the videos. You’re still pretending as if we don’t have selfish people here who would rather just kill all the poor. You at least have people who care and help others. Here in the Nordics, due to there being a system people can point to, personal responsibility for anyone doing badly is extremely small. People are apathetic and just default to “the system should be helping them.”
Hell, when I was properly suicidal, my mom literally just went “well what do you want me to do about it” and called the social workers with a care notice or something. The funny bit being that she is a social worker with higher education. What could she do? Idk, give me a ring sometime, or come to visit so I don’t feel as bad. But no. People just default to “the bureaucracy will help them, the bureaucracy is infallible”.
I’d kill for a system as imperfect as the one you take for granted
Except you’ve very clearly demonstrated that your assumed version of our system is pure fantasy.
There’s a reason we’re quite high in the suicide stats. Because we’re definitely not even close to being “the happiest country in the world”. I don’t ever remember my grandma laughing. She died cold and alone, hallucinating basically dream paralysis demons. With not even a nurse who would’ve know her, because the care home was being run down and there were just random nurses for a few shifts and then new ones again.
So I implore you, don’t put the Nordics on a fucking pedestal. Dismissing the problems we have, pretending this is some Lintukoto.
Would you rather be in prison with a dozen of your best mates, or literally forever alone without even the possibility of emotions and if you talk about them, you’ll be shunned?
You probably think I’m exaggerating about all this, but I’m really not
Again, just because you don’t know things about the Nordics nor see our news does not mean we don’t see yours.
What’s the point of competing who has it worse? That’s literally whataboutism that’s just dismissing Nordic problems. And you’re not even Nordic. Trying to have this discussion with fellow Nords is very hard, because lots and lots literally won’t allow themselves even an inch of wrong-think.
Our police seem very skilled, don’t they? I never had problems with them, always good interactions. Then I got arrested for weed. They put me in an isolation cell for 3 days while denying me my prescription medication, the lights were on constantly and there wasn’t even a mattress to sleep on or a blanket. Just the cold ground. Was the cell prolly cleaner than average jail cells in the US? Probably.
But would I be able to sue the shit ouf of them for literally torturing me, breaking Geneva conventions? At one point they turned of my water for hours. I have a congenital kidney malformation and due to that slight inefficiency in left kidney so I must keep good hydration.
I drew over 300 words in my own blood on the walls.
In the US there’d be a queue of lawyers on my door for all the violations, and I’d be looking at tens of thousands to millions in compensation.
Here in Finland, I can’t literally even get people to accept it happened. The only one who does is my therapist and he was born and raised in the UK only moved here later in life.
So we really don’t have to compete which sort of horror is the worst.
In the US, I’d probably be on the streets or in prison. But after years of literal solitude and nothing else, I’d actually welcome it. My own fucking mother went “weeeelll, you know, I can’t actually now what happened in the cell” when I phoned her to cry about my injuries and the injustice of it all. She implied it was my own fault that the police tortured me. And that’s the most anyone’s spoken to me about it. Finns always decline and refute it at first, then when I produce some photos (I only have those because they claimed I vandalised the cell. We then asked for the security cam footage as evidence of the crime. Weirdly it was suddenly completely lost and the charges dropped.
I would rather get beaten up and kicked than do that again. But again, both suck, they’re just different. So what’s the point in competing who has it worse and by how much?
There’s clearly problems in both places. I’m not critical of everything in the Nordics, but nor am I critical of everything America either, despite having been actively arguing against your foreign policies and criticising you in general for a few decades online.
And don’t get me started on medical care… It’s literally worse than you could imagine. You wouldn’t believe me even if I sugar coated it
Do you think the free healthcare here is some superior quality? No. The best in classes go to private clinics, the worst end up in the public system. And the wait times are ridiculous. Some of the doctors have confidently said things that are just plain untrue. I could genuinely list 30+ years of bad experiences in the public healthcare system. Sure it’s not bankrupting me, but it’s also not doing jack shit for anything and genuinely gets like 80% of their guesses wrong when it’s even the least bit subjective. You wouldn’t believe half the shit I’ve heard from supposed “professionals”.
So again, every different, but neither is good, is it? So don’t think you’d “kill” to switch places with me, when I’ve spent a good deal of the past few years considering just killing myself.
I get what you’re saying, and I’m not comparing personal experiences at all, that sounds horrible. If I thought the Nordic countries were some kind paradise, I’d be working my ass off to get there. I get that the entire world is being worn down by the billionaires
But you still don’t get it… If you lived here, your worst 3 days is something common for people who fall through the cracks. There are people kept in similar conditions for months or years at a time. Including for just having a small amount of weed
And it’s legal to do this in a lot of places. It isn’t something they have to cover up, they might not even need to justify it with a reason.
Hell, lots of people take pride in the cruelty to “criminals”.
And you don’t understand our medical system… Our outcomes are terrible. Your unhelpful free healthcare has better outcomes than what we go into lifelong debt for
And your meds… Depending on what you need, it could be hundreds of dollars a month, sometimes even with insurance. Without it, there’s no upper limit, many drugs are in the thousands… You’d have to jump through hoops with the drug companies and hope they give you enough of a discount
So yeah… You probably would be dead. And if you weren’t, you’d be just as alone, and more battered by your experiences
I get why you feel otherwise. Part of me craves disaster, because at least then it would justify my suffering. At least then my struggles would be less abstract. It’s very normal to feel that way when you don’t have hope in the future
But if we’re talking about economic and legal systems, you can’t throw your hands up and say “every system has problems”. Obviously they do. But if you want hope, and to build political momentum, you have to convince people something better is possible. And perfect or not, the Nordic model exists
On a personal level, the best advice I can give you is to fight. Find an organization pushing for people falling through the cracks, and get involved with them in whatever way you can. Whether that results in change or not, being around others who believe in the same things and doing something about it builds hope
Oh wow quite a few broken thoughts there.
I know, I’m a bit sensitive when it comes to people telling me essentially “you haven’t tried hard enough.”
Anyway, the one childhood friend who was a man-kebab, that dude didn’t invite me to his wedding with a bitch who was equally or more an abuser of alcohol and they didn’t because was vocally for the legalisation of weed.
If you lived here, your worst 3 days is something common for people
Homelessness is common sure. But staying awake for three days while sober, shitting the eherloving shit out of yourself while eating your fingers until they literally bleed and then proceed to paint with your own blood for 70+ hours is… common in the US? And you don’t think that could be a bit offensive to me, dismissing literal torture I went through? (Sleep deprivation is torture, not to mention anything about closing off the water and not giving me my prescription meds.)
But hey, you’re not victimblaming, just dismissing it. So it’s still not as bad as literally every Finnish person I know.
But staying awake for three days while sober, shitting the eherloving shit out of yourself while eating your fingers until they literally bleed and then proceed to paint with your own blood for 70+ hours is… common in the US? And you don’t think that could be a bit offensive to me, dismissing literal torture I went through? (Sleep deprivation is torture, not to mention anything about closing off the water and not giving me my prescription meds.)
Yes that’s literally just something that happens to people. Yes, it’s definitionally torture… But it’s normal here. Normally, people paint the walls in shit, but blood is far from unheard of
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One day some people will grow a personality rather than slavishly identifying with an ideology.
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