Can you give some examples?
Some examples below, but to preface, I should expand a bit on what I wrote. I don't know enough about the Nordic countries specifically, just things I've read here and there. It may be that some policies work better there than in other places, and even that some of what they do can be replicated. But similar policies, when instituted in the U.S., for example, seem not to work as intended, or to create additional 'unforeseen' problems. There's probably the cultural element involved here, and the fact that human societies are so complex that the results of interventions cannot be accurately predicted.
Also, I think that some policies widely considered socialist are a good idea, despite the problems they create. Perhaps there is a better way - I just don't think human societies have discovered them yet. For instance, universal health care - countries like Canada and the Nordics are great in a lot of ways, or at least better than the U.S. system for instance (while using technology developed in the States) - but wait times and lack of specialists causes many to travel to other countries for treatment, if they can afford it. Worth it? Maybe! But I do think healthcare should be easily available for everyone - I'm just not sure what the limits are.
Next, there's public education, which is a good idea on the surface of things, until you read someone like Gatto, or just take a look at the state of public education in the States. Charter/voucher schools do way better, including in the ghettoes, where inner city, low-income children are better educated than their neighbors in public schools. Sowell wrote recently:
Some of these charter schools — especially those in the chain of the Success Academy schools and the chain of the KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program) schools — operate in low-income, minority neighborhoods in the inner-cities, and turn out graduates who can match the educational performances of students in affluent suburbs. What is even more remarkable, these charter schools are often housed in the very same buildings, in the very same ghettoes, where students in the regular public schools fail to learn even the basics in English or math. (
Education at a Crossroads, by Dr. Thomas Sowell)
Sweden actually switched to a voucher system recently.
Next, minimum wage laws. Again, great on the surface. Minimum wage increases, and those working minimum wage jobs then get more money. Except that increasing the minimum wage actually results in more unemployment (thus more welfare). More people apply for the jobs, fewer get hired. And it's the disadvantaged who get priced out of the job market. In Sowell's "Discrimination & Disparities", he gives examples. In 1948 there was no significant difference between unemployment of white and black teens. Black youths actually had a higher labor force participation rate than whites the same age. As minimum wage laws were restored, teenage unemployment skyrocketed, disproportionately among blacks. Minimum wage laws also force some small/medium-sized business out of business, who are then left out of the statistics when analyzing employment data of existing businesses (only the survivors contribute data).
An example from Seattle: after minimum wage increases, employment in high-quality restaurants remained the same, but lower-quality restaurants shut down. In other words, some employees got more wages, but others lost their jobs, and fewer new restaurants opened, thus providing fewer chances for employment in that industry. Sowell:
In Seattle as well, the response to a higher local minimum wate rate increase was that a number of restaurants simply closed down. A study ... measured employment by hours of work, as well as by the number of workers employed, and concluded that "the minimum wage ordinance lowered low-wage employees' earnings by an average of $125 per month in 2016." Thus a theoretical increase in income from a higher minimum wage became, in the real world, a significant decrease in income.
...
Internationally, unemployment rates have been markedly lower in times and places where neither governments nor labor unions set most wage rates. Most modern nations have had minimum wage laws, but the few that have not have tended to have strikingly lower unemployment rates.
Then there's affirmative action and affordable housing to "reduce inequality". One of the reasons for the housing bubble crash was the US regulators forcing banks to give out loans they knew couldn't be paid back in order to meet quotas. We've carried enough articles on affirmative action so I don't think I need to give examples there.
Regarding high tax rates, again that might be country-specific - how much citizens are willing to pay and what they get in return. But even in Sweden the richest Swedes evade over 30% of their taxes through moving money offshore (or they just move to another country). In the 1920s in the U.S., they income tax rate was reduced from 73 to 24%, and tax revenue increased, especially from the richest Americans. Similar thing happened in 2006.
As for welfare states in general, again it's mixed. It's not utopia, and I'm not sure how to weigh the net positives and negatives. Because welfare does incentivize laziness to some degree, and they need enough growth to keep them going. Sweden ran into economic problems in the 90s (high inflation and interest rates) and after public outcry put into practice a bunch of free-market policies to avoid disaster (including privatizing their pensions, cutting public spending, privatizing numerous government monopolies and businesses - not to say any of those were necessarily the best decisions or the best implemented, though!). But their economy still isn't growing as fast as it was in the 60s before the more socialist policies were implemented. In Sweden today, housing prices are going up and unskilled workers are priced out of the market (including many of the immigrants - Sweden actually had great assimilation in the early parts of the 20th century, not so much anymore).
In the U.S., the poverty rate was falling before the "war on poverty" started in the mid 60s. After that it leveled out and has stayed there, despite trillions of dollars trying to drop it and avoid the periodic increases in poverty levels. Like minimum wage laws, welfare actually traps the poorest in poverty - getting off welfare by entering the next tax bracket costs more than staying on welfare.
The single mom is better off earning gross income of $29k with $57,327 in net income & benefits than to earn gross income of $69k with net income & benefits of $57,045.
(
https://danieljmitchell.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/welfare-trap.jpg)
It's not a hard-and-fast rule, because some will prefer to get off welfare, even if that means earning less money, but the problem is still there. Implicit tax rates can be as high as 80% to 100% or even higher for low-income individuals or families because of it (
Who pays the highest income tax? - OECD Observer).
One last funny thing regarding anti-socialism hysteria:
One Swedish political consultant laughingly told me about an encounter he had with a Republican operative visiting from the U.S., in which he drove the Republican into a rage by citing all the ways in which "the U.S. is more socialist than Sweden." (
https://www.usnews.com/opinion/arti...at-socialist-scandinavia-and-sweden-really-do)
As for why I consider such policies misguided to a large degree, that has to do more with the mentality behind them. Most political interventions are not thought through to see if they'll actually work. They just do whatever sounds good and sounds palatable to their voters. This has to do with what you said about competence hierarchies and politicians. I think the main reason for that is that competence is not actually a criterion by which politicians are chosen. And no matter how bad they are, all they need to do is get re-elected, which is fairly easy. So you have a bunch of idiots only concerned about re-election. What kind of policies do we think they're going to put into effect, especially because they have no skin in the game - no consequences for failure?
And those policies that ARE chosen are usually written up along an ideological basis - not based on any kind of empirical study of the probabilities that the policy will actually do what it's supposed to. And that ideological basis is usually vaguely utopian in nature: to "end inequality". Well, that's never going to happen (gini coefficients have been relatively stable for millennia, barring war and disaster, which are the only things to bring everyone down to equality). Better to see what can mitigate the effects while doing the least amount of damage in the process.
Beginnings of globalisation started here in Australia back in the 70's when Gough Whitlam signed UNIDROIT effectively bringing in private international law. At the time he also introduced the 'Seas and Submerged Lands Act 1973' that deems anything within 12 nautical miles (26kms) landward of the low tide mark of a water source - ocean, dam, lake, river etc as being underwater and in the jurisdiction of admiralty law where claims in the main can only be about private contracts and in rem - or about property and things (Operators and Things anyone?)
