Second Thoughts about Socialism?

Carol Iannone writes:

Author Trevor Corson has lived in Finland and writes in the Christian Science Monitor about the high quality of life that Finns enjoy. They have free health care and one of the world’s best education systems, which is free through college. They have universally well maintained buildings, schools, hospitals, buses, trains, and parks. Most Finns, he admits, will never have a big house or car, their taxes are so high that few can become wealthy, and Helsinki does not feature any grand buildings. But he says that their efficiently run country and their government benefits give them less tangible assets, such as peace of mind.

However, Corson continues, there is a down side to Finland’s statist orderliness—high rates of depression and alcoholism. Many Finns seem to suffer from low self-esteem! Corson also confesses that he found the country a bit dull, and was happy to get back to the energy, entrepreneurship, and opinionatedness of America. Still, he says, and he is not wrong about this, that a sometimes overly materialistic America could learn something about the less material aspects of the good life from the Finns. But so could the Finns learn something from us—that you don’t feel fully alive when you aren’t fending for yourself a little, when government is providing everything for you.

Meanwhile, in an interview in 2004, Morton Sobell, the convicted Communist spy and Julius Rosenberg associate who protested his innocence decade after decade and then admitted his guilt shortly before his death in 2008, rendered some final observations on socialism, the ideology to which he had devoted his life and for which he had betrayed his country. He said that socialism is flawed because it relies on cooperation, whereas societies are healthier when they have competition! Of course, he didn’t say anything about the gulags that are waiting for those who fail to “cooperate.” But still, how’s that for a complete reversal and something it would be very good for President Obama and his leftist followers to learn before it is too late. The interview with Sobell is one of the special features on the DVD of Heir to an Execution, a personal documentary by Ivy Meeropol on the execution of her grandparents, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.

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Ron K. writes:

Mr. Corson is wrong if he thinks Finns’ “high rates of depression and alcoholism” are due to their governance. Those are racial characteristics of the Finns themselves, and would occur under any regime. I’ve lived there myself and appreciate their land and culture, but people are what they are. Finland is certainly dull—they’re the first to admit this, and it’s the core of their satire—but so is Switzerland, which is much less of a nanny state. And those countries share a similar standard of living, despite stark differences in tax policy.

A possible reason for Finland’s statism is the mass emigration of its more libertarian and/or enterprising elements in previous centuries. That certainly explains modern Sweden and Germany. (And European Jewry as well—they rolled over in the 1930s because all the aggressive ones came here in the 1890s.)

Finland is not “socialist.” Thirty years ago Douglas Casey called her Swedish twin “fascist,” a more appropriate term for all the Scandinavian lands.

Tim W. writes:

American liberals often cite Europe’s far north lands as evidence that socialism works. But to say that socialism works, one would have to find a nation that was impoverished prior to implementing socialism, and then had a good standard of living afterward. That doesn’t seem to be the case in Finland, Sweden, or other countries cited as proof of socialism’s success. A better description of those nations would be that they had a good standard of living before socialism, and have retained it afterward.

Socialism is less destructive in a small population, homogeneous nation. It deadens the people’s spirit, but doesn’t literally kill the nation. The same policies imposed on the United States would be a disaster, with our large population, large land area, and ever-advancing “diversity.”

I remember when I was in college, gun control advocates often cited European nations and their low violent crime rates as “proof” that gun control works. You rarely hear that argument being used today, because those nations (which were nearly all white 30 years ago) are now filling up with Muslims and Africans and have the rising crime rates that accompany that. As Finland, Sweden, and Norway grow more diverse, it’ll be interesting to see how well socialism works there. Something tells me it won’t.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at May 04, 2009 11:34 AM | Send