Some thoughts on the social democracies of northern Europe, especially Scandinavia.
One, it works to the extent that people are moral, carry their own burdens and are virtuous. People appear to be happy there, by and large, and as much as conservatives may hate that fact, there it is.
To my way of thinking, the desire to take care of fellow members of your social order is desirable. If we define that as “socialism”, then socialism is desirable AND achievable, given sufficient moral elevation.
The problem is in the sequencing. Scandinavians have a very homogeneous cultural order, by and large, and it is characterized by honesty, hard work, and attention to detail. If you took away these virtues, their experiment would fail tomorrow.
In large measure, that is why socialism has failed here. You have to have a receptive “surface”. If you give money to people, they need to value it, and use it creatively.
What has happened here is that large segments of our population have come to believe that the government has money, and that the job of government is to give it to them. They have a sense of entitlement, without balancing responsibility. And that responsibility is not just to those writing them checks, but to their communities as a whole.
Government, to be clear, is not and never can be the same as a cultural order. It is a legal order, instituted by the implied capacity for violence, in the forms of seizing property, and jailing you.
For government to help, there must be an underlying cultural order, and to the extent government tries to play that role, what little cultural order remains is undermined.
It is a truism that “if you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime”; but a corollary is that if you give a man a life, he loses his own; if you expect him to live, he will generally do so.
I have called the Scandinavian system “sybaritic leftism”. My reasoning is that it is based upon the conception that life is supposed to be easy. People who grow up with that belief, atrophy. All of the Scandinavian countries have shrinking populations. All of the European countries do. The only fully industrialized nations that were continuing to grow, last I checked several years ago, were the United States, Israel, and South Africa.
It seems to me that excessive ease has a tendency to breed contempt for life.
These are a few scattered thoughts, not fully collated into a coherent pattern. I’ve read where some people want to die mid-sentence. Blog posts can end