The Nordic Myth: Johan Norberg Debunks Democratic Socialism
Johan Norberg is an author, lecturer, and documentary filmmaker. He is a Senior Fellow at both the Cato Institute and the European Centre for International Political Economy. He previously wrote for SpeakFreely about Simon’s Paradox. His latest book is called “Peak Human: What We Can Learn From History’s Greatest Civilizations”.
Oscar: Today I’m here speaking with Johan Norberg, historian, writer, academic, all of the above, great speaker as well, also author of the book Open: The Story of Human Progress, the Mirage of Swedish Socialism, the Capitalist Manifesto, In Defence of Global Capitalism, just a titan in the liberty space, so thank you for joining us.
Johan Norberg: Oh, my pleasure, thanks for having me.
OGL: So on Wednesday, the Finnish government introduced about a billion euros in tax cuts. Do you think this is a blow to the mythos of the idea of democratic socialist Nordic welfare states?
JN: I think so. I think the Nordic welfare states have been in transition for a long time, away from what many outsiders still think is some kind of socialist model. It’s not anymore, because we tried it in the 1970s and the 1980s, and it ended in spectacular failure. Just look at my own country, Sweden. We had 25 years without any real wage increases, without creating a single net job in the private sector. That’s a disaster. The big entrepreneurs, big companies like Aikin, Tetra Pak, H&M, they left Sweden during this period, and after that, politicians from all across the spectrum, even on the leftist side, agree that no, we can’t punish innovation, risk-taking, and education in this way anymore. We have to have an open market model. It’s not perfect; we haven’t gone all the way, but it’s certainly a blow to the old perspective of how the welfare states function.
OGL: Absolutely. So obviously you wrote the Mirage of Swedish Socialism for the Realities of Socialism project, and one of the things that I found interesting that you wrote about was that in the 1960s, that Sweden was, as you used James Otteson’s terminology, capitalist-inclined, and that it was doing quite well, economically successful, but then there was the transition in the 1970s and 1980s to a sort of more socialist-inclined way of governing. Why do you think there was that switch, there was the transition, that if everything was going so well, why change?
