The Nordic Way of Freedom

[Celerity]

Liberty isn’t when every jerk gets to inconvenience everyone else.

https://prospect.org/world/2023-09-14-nordic-way-of-freedom/



I recently took a reporting trip to Finland (Want to see that reporting? Keep reading the Prospect!), where I rented a car. Driving to my hotel, I was shocked at the incredibly civilized road manners on Finnish highways, thanks in large part to the omnipresent speed cameras and tickets that are assessed as a percentage of one’s income—121,000 euros, in one recent case. To Americans, this might seem like a typical example of nanny-state overreach. For many drivers here, freedom is when you get to drive your giant, powerful, heavy car with total disregard for the law and the safety of other drivers—as I saw on the drive to Newark Airport to catch my flight, during which I was nearly run off the road by a bunch of hooligans swerving through traffic at a hundred miles an hour.

But in reality, the Finland experience reflects a deeper and more mature idea of freedom than the childish selfishness that passes for it in the U.S. Strict traffic rules are a burden, in the sense that one must obey or pay a hefty price. But they also enable a much freer driving experience. With lower speeds in the city, merging, navigating, and other normal driving activities are much more straightforward. Those slow speeds, plus other traffic controls, also make life much safer for pedestrians and cyclists, adding up to a traffic death rate more than two-thirds lower than that of the U.S. Yet the basic point of driving—to get to where you are going—is easier and safer in Finland than in America. You can still take your car just about anywhere, you just can’t do so in a way that infringes on the transportation rights of others.

This conception of freedom can be seen throughout Nordic society. One of the core objectives of the Nordic social democratic welfare state, for instance, is to spread income out over the working life. The average person hits their peak earning years when they are in their forties and fifties, thanks to accumulated raises, greater experience, and so on. But people also need income outside those years—when they are children, or retired and not working at all, or when they are in their twenties and thirties and taking on the extreme expenses of starting a family.



So if you are, say, a 50-year-old Finnish accountant making good money, you are taxed quite heavily to fund benefits for young families and pensioners. But when those parents are in their prime earning years and you’ve retired, they pay for your pension, as well as the families coming up behind them. In this sense, there are powerful and self-interested reasons to support the welfare state—it shifts income from when you need it least to when you need it most, expanding your freedom to start a family when it makes the most biological sense and to retire in relative comfort.

snip

[Tesha]

1. Grown-up, whole-community freedom

In the US “Freedom and Liberty” crowd don’t give a damn about anyone else.

At all.

Unless in the end
it actually affects them.