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Happiness is a warm nanny-state? |
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Now, I wouldn’t say these findings are particularly scientific, and they’re certainly subjective, but Denmark has been ranked as the world’s happiest country:
Denmark, with its democracy, social equality and peaceful atmosphere, is the happiest country in the world, researchers said on Monday.
…
“I strongly suspect that there is a strong correlation between peace and happiness,” said Ronald Inglehart, a political scientist at the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research, who directed the study.
And, said Ingelhart, there is a strong correlation between happiness and democracy.
“Denmark is the happiest country in the world in our ratings,” Inglehart said in an audio statement released by the National Science Foundation, which paid for the analysis.
“Denmark is prosperous — not the richest country in the world but it is prosperous.”
Puerto Rico and Colombia also rank highly, along with Northern Ireland, Iceland, Switzerland, Ireland, the Netherlands, Canada and Sweden.
It doesn’t surprise me that a great many “social democracies” - countries with policies like universal health care, high wages, strong unions, and a large social safety net, policies that would be labeled positively communist in the U.S. - rank highly in this study. The middle ground that many countries have found between extreme capitalism as practiced by America and tyrannical socialism as practiced by the former Soviet Union seems to me like a happy place to live. Freedom still reigns, but so does equality.
Will we ever see this kind of happiness in the U.S? I have my doubts. I subscribe to the view proffered by Naomi Klein, that these countries ended up with their happy medium because most of them were caught directly in the middle of the cold war between capitalism and communism. They eventually settled on a middle-way form of socialism as the tug-of-war subsided. Without big, strong communist and capitalist presences pulling the U.S. in different directions, it’s hard to see our country moving as far to the left as some of these countries did in 50 years.
Still, small, incremental gains are possible, or so I believe.Â
Do you think you’d be happy in a social democracy?
I like the idea of social democracy, too, but the United States is very different from Europe. What works there won’t necessarily work here. Nevertheless, I think we’d all be better off if we could get past the rugged individualism that has marked us since the earliest colonial days. It’s as if taking care of one another is somehow a sign of weakness.
I know Barack Obama said competition is a fact that will remain but I think cooperating under a new unity will yeild results cuz it could free up stuff to create.
I think one element of Denmark that might not be noted by the study, but could contribute to the government feeling responsible for the social plight of its citizens, is the relative geographical proximity of the national government in Copenhagen to the average citizen of Denmark. One aspect of democracy that is often overlooked in America is the necessity of the arteries of political and economic power to remain accessible to the average citizen. Denmark is smaller than somewhere around 3 to 4/5 of the individual states in the Union. I don’t see how we can imagine democracy is possible in a nation as large, over-extended, and fragmented as the United States (the same was true of the Soviet Union and of China today). Yet of course the individual states remain far too dependent on the economic infrastructure of the broader nation to sustain themselves in terms of food, jobs, etc.
A great step towards social democracy would be restore a sense of society, by having governments that are directly responsible to the citizens in their immediate geographical vicinity, rather than people connected to them only by statistics, freeways, and mass media. I think a big failure of progressives is simply taking the current 50 State megalith as a given, as something too sacred to change.
Colombia? Really?
Apparently. Odd, right?
Supporters of democracy are always quick to point out one of the perceived benefits of this system is the redistribution of wealth by government force to the poor. Although this may be true in limited fashion, the champions of this system never concern themselves with the victims from whom the wealth is stolen. The so-called benefits are short-lived, because democracy consumes wealth with little concern for those who produce it. Eventually the programs cannot be funded, and the dependency that has developed precipitates angry outcries for even more %u201Cfairness.%u201D Since reversing the tide against liberty is so difficult, this unworkable system inevitably leads to various forms of tyranny.
Although the motivating factor is frequently the desire for the poor to better themselves through the willingness of others to sacrifice for what they see as good cause, the process is doomed to failure. Governments are inefficient and the desired goals are rarely achieved. Administrators, who benefit, perpetuate the programs. Wealthy elites learn to benefit from the system in a superior fashion over the poor, because they know how to skim the cream off the top of all the programs designed for the disadvantaged. They join the various groups in producing the majority vote needed to fund their own special projects.
Public financing of housing, for instance, benefits builders, bureaucrats, insurance companies, and financial institutions, while the poor end up in drug-infested, crime-ridden housing projects. For the same reason, not only do business leaders not object to the system, but they also become strong supporters of welfare programs and foreign aid. Big business strongly supports programs like the Export/Import Bank, the IMF, the World Bank, farm subsidies, and military adventurism. Tax-code revisions and government contracts mean big profits for those who are well-connected. Concern for individual liberty is pushed to the bottom of the priority list for both the poor and rich welfare recipients.
What you’re describing are the U.S’s feeble attempts at social democracy. But I don’t see those problems on nearly that scale in some of the countries mentioned in the study here.
I think you make a good point if you look at it at the scale of the US. The US is a conglomerate of 50 states. Its politics are so far away from the people that it could not possibly deal with its local problems or be controlled in a proper way. More importantly it is merely impossible to change the strong culture of capitalism. However, that is not the path most social democracies took. Many came out of the ruins of World War 2, after which wealth had little meaning while the weak and the old could not support themselves.
Such a desire would in fact break the system. The system is based on the desire for equality. This means there should be no vertical segregation of society so that all may be offered equal opportunities. Money is not what gets you education, health care, housing, etc. You at best get a little extra. In effect the system sustains itself. With few mountains to climb, most people just settle for what they have.
I can assure you most of the Western-European countries are quite stable. Arguably more than the US, which is heavily influenced by overly powerful corporations.
Then why is it that American health care is so much more expensive than that of any other country, even for comparable quality? It is because they can be. They can be very profitable by healing just the rich and charge high prices. Public health care institutions cannot afford this luxury. They need to act with a limited budget and without dropping quality or they lose certification. Such institutions are either efficient or gone. Bureaucracy at the top is of course an unavoidable problem, but with the government paying the bills politicians are very much concerned with restraining it.
In a culture of 50 years of socialism most loopholes have been washed out. What you see in these societies is that there is a horizontal, rather than a vertical segregation. Each pillar tends to have its own political party, church and union and those are the ones that occupy influential groups and commisions. Since no single party is dominant each commision is a mixture of different views and the final decision a collective concession.
Such financing is always tied to your income. More importantly it is only for rentals, which are mostly owned by large non-profit organizations. If you are rich you buy your own house for which there is no public financing.
True, that is what you get when you try to turn capitalists into socialists, but that is not always the path people take.
I want to respond to your comments by pointing something out - America today no longer protects liberty, equal justice, private property, and voluntary exchange as demanded by our Constitution. It’s closer to Nazi Germany. Liberty, the market, and personal responsibility are of little interest and are eventually seen as impractical to the media industrial complex, military industrial complex, and pharmaceutical industrial complex which are all made possible by the unconstitutional financial industrial complex (The Federal Reserve). A system that rejects voluntary contracts, enlightened self interest, and individual responsibilities permits the government to assume these responsibilities. And the government officials become morally obligated to protect us from ourselves, attempting to make us better people and setting standards for our personal behavior. That effort is already in full swing. But if this attitude prevails, liberty is lost.
The vast majority of the American people have come to accept democracy as a favorable system and are pleased with our efforts to pursue president Wilson%u2019s dream of %u201Cmaking the world safe for democracy.%u201D But the goals of pure democracy and that of a constitutional republic are incompatible. A clear understanding of the difference is paramount,
In a free society with totally free markets, the votes by consumers through their purchases, or refusals to purchase, determine which businesses survive and which fail. This is free-choice %u201Cdemocracy%u201D and it is a powerful force in producing and bringing about economic efficiency. In today%u2019s democracy by decree, government laws dictate who receives the benefits and who gets shortchanged. Conditions of employment and sales are taxed and regulated at varying rates, and success or failure is too often dependent on government action than by consumers%u2019 voting in the marketplace by their spending habits. Individual consumers by their decisions should be in charge, not governments armed with mandates from the majority.
In a true republic, the people are in charge. The Constitution provides strict restraints on the politicians, bureaucrats and the military. Everything the government is allowed to do is only done with explicit permission from the people or the Constitution. Today in America, it%u2019s the opposite. The American people must get permission from the government for their every move, whether it%u2019s use of their own property or spending their own money.
When government assumes the responsibility for individuals to achieve excellence and virtue, it does so at the expense of liberty, and must resort to force and intimidation. Standards become completely arbitrary, depending on the attitude of those in power and the perceived opinion of the majority. Freedom of choice is gone. This leads to inevitable conflicts with the government dictating what one can eat, drink or smoke. One group may promote abstinence, the other tax-supported condom distribution. Arguments over literature, prayer, pornography, and sexual behavior are endless. It is now not even permissible to mention the word %u201CGod%u201D on public property. A people who allows its government to set personal moral standards, for all non-violent behavior, will naturally allow it to be involved in the more important aspects of spiritual life. For instance, there are tax deductions for churches that are politically correct, but not for those whose beliefs that are considered out of the mainstream. Groups that do not meet the official politically correct standards are more likely to be put on a %u201Cterrorist%u201D list.
Similarly, a good number of those countries really like hockey and skiing. Perhaps hockey and skiing lead to happiness. It also seems worth noting that we DO have that happiness in the U.S.; in particular, in Puerto Rico. As a rugged individualist, I very strongly support helping others, but I also feel a huge obligation to take care of myself, and I get very frustrated that others don’t seem to feel the same obligation.
I was in Copenhagen last summer and a bunch of Iranians seeking political asylum were on the sidewalk, sulking. They weren’t happy about the Danish government’s rejection of them.
@hudson spivey - canada is larger than the US (geographically) and at least as fragmented as the US (quebecois separatists, western conservatives, eastern fisherman, northern indigenous people, hugely ethnic thx to liberal immigration policies), yet manages to do socialist democracy quite nicely.
I agree with what others siad, both in terms of the different mindset of America and the sheer size of our country. Even the size of our states is dramatic by European standards…northern vs. southern California for example are quite different.
And beyond geographic size is population size.
Denmark - appx 5.5MM
N. Ireland - appx 1.75MM
Ireland - appx 4MM
etc…
The NYC, Chicago, LA, Bay Area, and other major metros would out-populate those entire countries!
A better way to think of it is (roughly speaking) the US is like the EU, with each country in the EU being a single state in the US. Now imagine the EU creating policy that applies across all countries…you’d have a hell of a time making that work out.
That said, maybe the solution is more state power and less federal involvement?
>> Do you think you’d be happy in a social democracy?
Yes, but given the choice I’d prefer freedom.
What you fail to understand is that these countries have a working democracy, that is run by the people, not a gigantic corporate structure. I am danish. I never see, hear or feel my government in my daily life. Im a ordinary person with the rights of free education, free healthcare and free to do what i want. If our government fails to provide the peoples demands and needs, they get thrown from office. We the people decide and that is freedom.
The rugged individualism that has marked us since the earliest colonial days is the very thing that has made our Nation great. Taking care of one another is also one of the hallmarks of our nation. The disconnect is in how and why we take care of one another. If the giving that people do in this country were measured you would be surprised at how deeply people dig into their pockets to help their neighbors. Look at the donations made to almost any worthy charity, and you may discover the truth of this. As a I reserve the my right to choose who to help and when. Who gave our government the right to take my hard earned money and give it to someone else in the name of taking care of one another? I’ve worked for someone else most of my life. For the past few years I have been moving towards earning my own living based upon my skills and abilities, not as an employee, but as a freelancer or private contractor. Whatever you want to call it, I find my own clients and my own jobs so that I don’t have to depend upon a Job. I take responsibility for taking care of me. There have been times when things got tight, and I’ve had to hustle to make it. Fortunately I have very good friends who stepped up to help me out in my time of need. They didn’t give me a handout, but they did discover some work that I could do for them. Huh! I guess I got some help from some . Helping one another is not a sign of weakness. It is a sign of strength.
I don’t think I can argue with your prioritization of “rugged individualism” over happiness, but hey, I’d like a choice in the matter two, for myself. I think I’ll choose happiness.
The problem with your choice, between “happiness” (state-provided welfare) and “rugged individualism” is that your concept of happiness isn’t a choice at all, it would funded by mandatory taxes that the “rugged individualists” would be unable to opt-out of.
If you find happiness through helping others, feel free to donate your time and money to charitable organizations, but don’t force others to give their money to the government to dole out as they please (because let’s be honest, once the money leaves your hands you have very little say in where it will go).
I believe all these comments fail on several levels. 1)Short on facts. 2)Short on history 3)Long on opinion. The United States Constitution is a flawed unfinished document. In Denmark all your rights are spelled out in plain wording. Our constitution requires constant tweaking and interpretation. That’s how these worthless polititions and corporations run your life. They own the machine of change: government.
Unfortunately I don’t think the corporate monopolistic powers that are now seeking to create a beyond national form of their own government will let the countries remain the way they are forever.
The forces that take over media and then destablize social safety nets to replace them with monopolistic controlled utilities and communications seem to be hell bent on spreading their model around the world.
They are chipping away at France’s social system and canada’s as they preach private competition to social safety nets which soon become take away the prime unneeded people and leave only the expensive ones to collapse the governmental systems etc etc
until there is world court that outlaws the ridiculous artificial person hood shield provided by immortal corporate shells with no real criminal accountability by the people that own and or run them - we will continue to have this strange imbalance of power between people and fictional entities acting immortally for the control of world resources to dispense at the highest profit with no regard for the quality of life of people of the planet.
The quotes have been misplaced in the above article—
it should read social “democracies”
..and as for happiness,
it is not so hard making people believe that they are happy ,when the state has had total control of all publici nstitutions and infomration flow to the citizens for more than 60 years in these countries.
..and as one previous commenter noted,
in which state is it most easy to control and brainwash the population …errrrr…I meant to create happiness:
..in the state with 5 M people,or the one with 300 M
(spoken from experience as a lifelong inhabitant and citizen of one of these countries)
“Rugged Individualism”. I’d like to point out that Europeans or at least those of the modern states are reknown for thinking outdide of the box and the idea that only Americans are capable of being rugged individualists is insulting and total garbage when used as a point to defend the lack of social values inhrerent in the minds of many.
I would like to know how a cancer victim feels about the help the community gives when the insurance runs out. The only reason the States doesn’t have free education, free healthcare is that some people make a lot of money out building weapons, fleecing the sick and then making families pay for the very education that those same companies cannot function without. Its a joke, history look back at the US and wonder how on earth the richest country ever could have been so callous.
Maybe if EVERYONE in the US was pasty white with blond hair and blue eyes like everyone in Denmark it would work.
Call us when Denmark is finished being over run by its current INVASION of fascist Islamic jihadists and is no longer called “Denmark” but “DENMARKISTAN”.
Hopefully in the future the United States of Mexicanada will be strong enough to protect itself from the Islamic States of Eurabia.
Can someone please define “Nanny State”? I dont get it?
JT
http://www.Ultimate-Anonymity.com
It’s ironic, so many people claiming they want the “freedom” to live in a country that can barely pull itself out of the robber baron age of the 19th century. Freedom to get sick and become bankrupt, freedom to work longer than most in the world but have crappy productivity, freedom to use an easily rigged voting system designed to cope with pre-modern agrarian empires. Freedom to spend more on its military and on military-industrial corporate welfare than the rest of the world put together yet be powerless to prevail over crappy third-world sandpit nations.
Freedom.
What you fail to understand is that these countries have a working democracy, that is run by the people, not a gigantic corporate structure. I am danish. I never see, hear or feel my government in my daily life. Im a ordinary person with the rights of free education, free healthcare and free to do what i want. If our government fails to provide the peoples demands and needs, they get thrown from office. We the people decide and that is freedom.
>that these countries ended up with their happy medium because most of them were caught directly in the middle of the cold war between capitalism and communism.
That doesn’t apply to countries like Canada, Australia, etc. Which were not really ‘caught directly in the middle’. I think a more appropriate discussion of the political forces behind this is actually why it has _not_ happened in the US. Basically every developed country apart from the US is a ’social democracy’, probably because it is simply sensible policy. Some of the ideology displayed in the previous comments probably explains partly why: the propaganda of the cold war still holds much sway over the minds of Americans.
I’d agree with that. It’s not a universal rule, and it makes the study of the differences between, especially, Canada and the US very interesting.
Cause and effect…
Is anyone saying that the “social democracy” caused the happiness ?
Maybe Denmark’s people have a strong sense of community and maybe that makes them happy. It is possible that the happiness and social democracy are unrelated.
Maybe happiness causes “social democracy”.
Even as a correlation this is a weak story: China has socialism-are they happy ? Where’s the far side of this story - a list of all the socialist countries and how happy they are ?
“Democracy” is a way of choosing a government. “Capitalism” and “Socialism” are economic systems. You appear to have confused the two. Further, the pejorative term “stolen” makes a lot of assumptions. What wealth is “stolen”? If you mean mere taxation, then how can any taxation be allowed? Without said taxation, governments cannot exist.
The only trouble with this assertion is that it doesn’t appear to be universally true. Yes, France has had some issues with said “angry outcries”, but tyranny? Nope. In fact, the countries cited above can hardly be described as tyrannical. So before you condemn socialism (I assume you meant that instead of “democracy”) as unworkable, why not look at other countries to find out if it works? If the countries mentioned really are happier, I think it’s worth asking why.
On the flip side, you can look at Hong Kong. Because of the outlook of her people and their unique circumstances, a system approaching laissez-faire appears to have been successful — but that’s because the people support it. In Finland, socialism appears to have been successful — but that’s because the people support it. The success or failure of any economic system is largely dependent on whether or not it fits the culture of the people who live there. People should remember this rather than try to assume that their culture is appropriate for everyone else.
Nanny state means that the government takes responsibility from you, and looks after you, so you don’t have to think. From what I know of the US and my own country, Denmark seems to treat people a lot more like adults, trusting the individuals judgement, rather than enacting and enforcing harsh laws to ensure everyone tows the same line.
But the point is more, I think the safety net of a welfare system (although most people have private unemployment insurance anyway) and good union agreements means that danes have a much better work/life balance. The working week here for someone who works in any public service post is something along the lines of 8am-4pm mon-thurs and 8am-2pmish friday (a 37.5ish hour working week - plenty of time with friends/family in the evenings). Private sector workers don’t get a paid lunch, but have the same number of hours a week. And the minimum wage is around 20 USD/hr. Most people earn more than that. Childcare is cheap for those with a family, and enables mothers to work if they wish (most do). As the danish society was traditionally a puritan one, displays of wealth are somewhat frowned upon, which removes the “keeping up with the joneses” element.
Add to that publicaly funded higher education, which many (most?) young people take advantage of, with generous grants to people studying beyond the age of 18, and it’s quite easy to see why people are content here. They have enough money to enjoy life, without having to strive to work two jobs just to pay the rent. Everyone has a chance to better themselves.
You mean aside from their national healthcare plan, which is in absolute shambles, right? The Canadians pouring over the border to get life-saving medical help unavailable to them at home don’t seem too pleased with the way their system is working.
Also, “thx” to their liberal immigration policies, Canadians are seeing a huge influx of Muslims, with the accompanying budding of Sharia law and “anti-Islam” speech codes (all in the name of fairness and “religious tolerance” of course). Time will tell how happy Canadians will be with these changes.
Given that, despite the supposed happiness of the Danes, there is in fact “something rotten in Denmark,” I would not count on the future being all roses for our northern neighbors.
[citation needed]
co-operation > competition.
We used to laugh at the people in the USSR who had no idea about what western life was like. It is very worrying how similar some of these posts look. “The US is the greatest, and life is terrible everywhere else”. “Rugged individualism is our guiding star — we should not even think about widening free health care”.
Nobody is cutting you off from the information about how the US can be improved, just your own belief that that poor kid down the road deserves to suffer. They must have brought the trouble on themselves, because the US system is perfect.
Children are typically very happy too, compared to their parents. If you ask a common seven year old child how happy they are, you’ll get a positive response. After all, they get to play all day, someone cooks for them, cleans for them, drives them around, pays for their medical bills, and generally sees to it that their needs are met allowing them to focus on what is truly important: their own interests.
Alternatively, if you ask adults how happy they are, you hear about their stress level. They have to work for some schlub that doesn’t know what they hell is going on. They’ve gotten too far into debt and are worried about where the money is going to come from. Layoff rumors are in the air. Food prices have doubled in the last year. They’ve been putting off their own dental/medical treatments so they can pay the bill for their kid’s ER visit. In general, as a provider for dependents, they get to worry.
These so-called “social” governments are an example of democracies that have voted to return themselves to a state of childhood. Of course they are happy. Someone ELSE is footing the bill.