On Tuesday’s episode of ABC’s “The View,” co-hosts Joy Behar and Meghan McCain had a fiery exchange over socialism. But McCain has the facts on her side.
Situated in the context of self-described democratic socialist Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez‘s recent primary victory in New York City, Meghan McCain pointed out that socialism has led the world’s most oil-rich nation, Venezuela, to become a mad starvation kingdom (it’s also a land of 1 million percent inflation).
Behar responded, “I think [Ocasio-Cortez] is talking more about Scandinavia.” But when McCain then asked for the name of one country where socialism has ever worked, Behar injected, “Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Iceland.” The crowd loved it.
Reality does not. Because the Scandinavian myth of socialist utopia is a sorry one.
First off, Denmark is a poor example for Behar to use. Like Norway, Denmark is highly reliant on oil wealth to afford its bloated welfare system, but it’s also a standout from the other Scandinavian nations in that its economy is relatively low-regulation. That’s hardly the characteristic of a socialist economy.
Second, beyond Ikea, how many great engineering products or new medicines come from Scandinavia? I ask this question because socialists’ primary contention is that their system provides for maximal human interests. Yet without the new innovations that allow us to enjoy better, longer lives alongside our families and boost our economies (which improves lives), where would we be?
This speaks to a broader point. Namely, that the central reason socialism appears compatible with good lives is that it benefits from access to goods that capitalist systems have created. Indeed, capitalist economies like the U.S. even subsidize socialist access to these goods. In a historical sense, this really isn’t debatable. Consider divergence between the Soviet Union and the U.S. in providing for better lives. Both nations had large reserves of human and material capital and advanced education and infrastructure systems, but one had a private system of economic structuring and the other had a centralized system.
Guess which system produced more goods of higher quality for more people?
The one that won the Cold War. It’s easy to get lost in how truly awful socialism is, but I want to focus on the Scandinavian model’s weaknesses. Not, for example, socialism’s inexorable structural penchant for authoritarianism; either silent (government bureaucrats) or overt (the European Union).
To start, the Scandinavian model has a key difference from the U.S. that makes it a poor comparative analytical economic model. And that’s the traditional homogeneous culture and workforce in Scandinavian nations, which motivated a culture of work even when work was unnecessary, thanks to welfare systems.
In recent years, however, we’ve seen a quite dramatic shift in Scandinavian politics towards once fringe anti-immigrant parties and economic liberalization policies. The motivating factor here has been the increased demand on social welfare systems and a perception that immigrant communities are taking advantage of those systems without providing reciprocal economic inputs.
Economic reality has also played a role in these changes. Because with the exception of Iceland, insulated by its tourist driven economy, neither Finland nor Norway nor Sweden have experienced annual GDP growth beyond 2 percent over the past five years. That should raise some alarm bells in Joy Behar’s brain.
The economic data also reflects another truth: the misery that socialism causes for young people. The OECD data shows that with the exception of Norway (which can provide unproductive employment by disbursements from its vast oil-wealth fund) and Iceland (tourism!), Scandinavia has some of the highest youth unemployment rates in the economically developed world. While 2017 youth unemployment was 9.2 percent in the U.S., it was nearly double that in Sweden (17.9 percent) and Finland (19.8 percent). The divergence speaks to socialist barriers to employment entry.
So yes, Joy Behar might believe that socialism means “better schools, better post office, better garbage pickup.” But the facts say otherwise. The facts say that socialism sucks.
