Eat the Rich: A Treatise on Economics (9 page)

“Then what stopped the looting?” I said.

“They were finished,” said Elmaz.

A little before curfew on my last night in Albania, I was sitting in a café with the wire-service reporter and a couple other fellow stateside hacks. “Albanians are just like anybody else,” I was saying.

“They’re crazy,” said the wire-service reporter.

“No, they’re not,” I said. “They just have a different history, different traditions, a different set of political and economic circumstances. They’re acting exactly the way we would if we…”

There was an Albanian family at the next table: handsome young husband, pretty wife, baby in a stroller, cute four-year-old girl bouncing on her dad’s knee. The girl grabbed the cigarette from between her father’s lips and tried a puff. Mom and Dad laughed. Dad took the cigarette back. Then he pulled a pack of Marlboros from his shirt pocket, offered a fresh cigarette to the little girl, and gave her a light.

Nobody was teaching four-year-olds to smoke in Sweden. Nobody was doing anything bizarre there. I was walking through Gamla Stan, the Old Town in Stockholm, when it struck me that Sweden was the only country I’d ever been to with no visible crazy people. Where were the mutterers, the twitchers, the loony importunate? Every Swede seemed reasonable, constrained, and self-possessed. I stared at the quaint, narrow houses, the clean and boring shops, the well-behaved white people. They appeared to be Disney creations—and not from the new, hip, PG-13 Disney rumored to be opening a Scotch-and-Water Park. This was the Disney of the original Disneyland. Gamla Stan had the same labored cuteness, preternatural tidiness, and inexhaustible supply of courtesy from its denizens. I half-expected to turn around and see someone dressed as Donald Duck. Instead, I turned around and saw someone dressed as the king of Sweden. Which, in fact, he was. King Carl XVI Gustaf was riding, in a gilded coach-and-four with footman in knee breeches holding on behind, right down the middle of the street in a country renowned the world over for its utter egalitarianism.

I’d gone to Sweden in February 1996 to find a socialist paradise. I was looking for someplace that had the prosperity of Wall Street without the chaos of Albania, someplace where wealth was better spread around than a free market tends to spread it, and where economic life had fewer shocks and alarms. And I’d gone to Sweden in February on the theory that anyplace can pass itself off as paradise on a balmy summer weekend, especially a place where nude volleyball was pretty much invented. But let us look at paradise when the days are so short that if you take an afternoon nap, you not only wake up in the dark, you miss sunrise. And as for the temperature: “It’s not so cold,” say the Swedes. “We’re right on the water here, so it never really gets that…Darn it, hand me the hammer, Rolf. The Mr. Coffee has frozen solid again.”

But a socialist paradise was what, indeed, I found—“
folkhemmet,
” as it’s called, “the people’s home.” This sounds like the latest sensitive renaming of the local poorhouse, but the word has perhaps more charm in the original language. Sweden is a welfare state from cradle to grave, and further than that. Between elaborate sex education and the constitutional status of the Lutheran Church, Sweden provides for its citizens from, as the Swedes put it, “erection to resurrection.”

Medical care is available to everyone in Sweden at nominal cost, even to tourists, though I was not personally lucky enough to have an accident or disease while I was there. A visit to the doctor costs between fifteen dollars and twenty dollars. A specialist gets five dollars more. Hospital stays cost about twelve dollars a night for anything from a twisted ankle to cancer.

Unemployment insurance is 75 percent of your pay, and there’s unlimited sick leave at the same rate of compensation. If you’re completely disabled, you get your whole paycheck. (During a brief period of nonsocialist rule in 1991, a one-day waiting period for sick-leave benefits was instituted. An enormous drop in Monday and Friday worker illnesses resulted—one of the medical miracles of the twentieth century.)

Day care is available for all children from infancy until who knows when. Maybe until they get senile, because I have an official Swedish government report (which I never quite summoned the patience to read) titled
The Old Are Youngsters Who Have Grown Older.
Parents pay about 10 percent of day-care costs. Eighty-four percent of women work—most of them in day-care centers. No, it just seems that way. A very large proportion of women are employed in the public sector, however. Some of them are in Parliament.

Swedes get five weeks of legally mandated paid vacation. If you have a baby, parental leave lasts 450 days, at up to 80 percent of salary, and either the mother or the father can stay home. An additional 120 leave days can be had to care for a sick child. Thus some Swedes are able to take 570 days a year off from work. And teenage girls who become pregnant can presumably get fifteen months off from school with good grades.

Actually, there isn’t any grading in Sweden until high school, and education is free through the Ph.D. level, with additional “study assistance” money available, plus cheap student loans. This should pretty much carry you through to retirement, which comes at age sixty-five, when you’ll get an annual pension equaling two-thirds of the average income from your fifteen best earning years. And all benefits are indexed to inflation.

Sweden has managed to do these fine things without the usual side effects of collectivism. It didn’t invade Poland and France, or send any of its citizens to Siberia. Sweden’s per-capita gross domestic product is a hearty $20,800. Swedish life expectancy is 78.2 years, even if they do call in sick a lot. That’s versus seventy-six years in the United States. And infant mortality is 4.5 per 1,000 live births, compared with the American rate of 6.5 per 1,000. There’s no poverty worth mentioning in Sweden, and no great wealth. Well, there is great wealth, but they play it down. A Volvo limousine is something to see. Seventy-two percent of Swedish households have a washing machine. Ninety-seven percent have a television set. There’s a car for every two adults. The Swedish system works.

Except the Swedish system is broken. In recent years the Swedish government’s budget deficit has been as high as 12 percent of the gross domestic product. By comparison, at the end of the Reagan-Bush era, when America’s budget balancers had let all the spinning plates fall on their heads, the U.S. deficit was less than 5 percent of GDP. We in America consider our body politic to be perilously in hock, but the Swedish national debt is, proportionately, 40 percent greater than ours. Sweden’s national debt is nearly equal to its GDP—to all the things made and all the work done in Sweden annually. To get even, the Swedes would have to move next door and mooch off Finland for a year. Just paying the interest on the national debt takes 7 percent of everything produced in Sweden. And this despite the Swedes taxing the hell out of themselves. The tax burden is the highest in the developed world. More than half of the GDP goes for taxes. So living in Sweden is like getting a divorce every April 15—a divorce with dependents. And these dependents never outgrow their need for child-support payments; quite the contrary:
The Old Are Youngsters Who…,
etc. Of an adult population of 7 million, 2.7 million are not working. Most of these people are living off some form of social benefits. Another 1.6 million are employed by the government or in government service agencies. And only 2.7 million are actually paying the bills by working in real businesses.

Public spending in Sweden is equal to nearly 70 percent of the GDP, and the Swedish economy is doing about as well as ours would be if seven out of ten of our economic decisions were made by political types. Would you send Newt Gingrich and Ted Kennedy to do your grocery shopping? How many of those groceries do you think would make it home? For twenty-five years, Sweden’s economic growth has been lagging behind that of other industrialized nations, and between 1990 and 1993 the Swedish economy shrank by 5 percent.

There’s been a small upturn since, but the Swedish Institute (government funded and hence prone to sunny outlooks) admits, “The majority of households have seen their financial circumstances deteriorate in recent years.” For Swedish industrial workers, aftertax earnings adjusted for inflation have stagnated since 1975. And rightly so, since Swedish labor productivity has increased by only 74 percent since 1970, compared with a 700 percent increase in labor costs—many of those costs resulting from government-mandated employer contributions to…well, to the government.

As the 700 percent figure might indicate, inflation has been a problem in Sweden. There have been only a few years since 1979 when Sweden’s inflation rate was below the average for other prosperous countries. Government deficits are partly to blame, but Sweden is also a small country moshed up against the Artic Circle. Unless Swedes want their material circumstances limited to wood pulp, livestock, and cod, they have to import a lot of things. The Swedish krona is one of the weakest currencies in Western Europe, Western Europeans being no fools. “Do you want that in deutsche marks, Swiss francs, or day care, family leave, and fifteen-dollar doctor visits?” Thus, imported goods are expensive in Sweden. In fact, everything’s expensive in Sweden because, on top of the other government exactions, there’s an astonishing 25 percent national sales tax on almost all goods and services. Every time you order a burger, you buy the government fries and a Coke. No, actually just a Coke, since the tax on food and restaurant meals is a mere 12 percent. At least tipping is minimal. The Swedish attitude seems to be that all services, even drink orders, should be provided by the government, and the government’s been tipped already.

One thing not causing Swedish inflation is an overheated job market, although full employment has been a principle of Swedish government since the 1930s. (Full employment is not one of my own personal goals in life, but it seems to be important to socialists.) Until 1990, Sweden had an unemployment rate of less than 3.5 percent, which is amazing, considering that 3.5 percent of my bum friends wouldn’t take
any
job, even if it paid $100 an hour and involved doing inventory for a blind liquor-store owner. But now Sweden’s unemployment rate is 7.6 percent, and, if you add the people in various do-little government programs with names like Youth Training Scheme and Working Life Development, the figure is closer to 13 percent.

Nor is the situation likely to change soon, since net investment in the Swedish economy has gone from about 16 percent of the GDP in 1970 to less than nothing recently. People have been going around to businesses, taking their investments back: “Give me that drill press.” In Sweden you can get a better return on your money from government bonds than you can from corporate stocks, and you don’t have to read the financial pages every day to see if the government’s still there. Believe me, it is.

So the Swedish system works, and the Swedish system is broken. This left me with a lot of questions about Sweden. And I wasn’t the only one. “What is Sweden like?” I was asked. A reasonable query, except it was posed by a Swede, and I’d only been in the country for a week. The foreign visitor’s thoughts are always of interest, I suppose. “How do you like Australia?” ask Australians. “Are you having fun in Italy?” ask Italians. “When are you leaving?” ask the French. But never in my travels have I had a native say to me, “Who are we, and what are we doing?”

I didn’t think it would be diplomatic to mention Disneyland. “It’s like Minnesota,” I said. “You know, wholesome, hygienic, polite, cold climate, everything works, and it’s full of, um, Swedes.” (Also, the radio programs are as dull as Garrison Keillor’s, at least if you don’t speak Swedish.)

Actually, Sweden isn’t like Minnesota
or
Disneyland, but then again, it isn’t much like Sweden, either. The people aren’t all that tall and blond, they don’t talk orgy-borgy talk, the women are no more beautiful than women generally are, and as for the vaunted Scandinavian lubricity, there was exactly one naughty-type Swedish magazine available at newsstands. It had the promising title
Slitz,
but the only nude photos were of an underfed young lady in appalling eye makeup, and the accompanying copy began with a sentence about “
legendariske visionaren och chefredaktoren Hugh M. Hefner.
” You don’t need to be a linguist to know where the hot stuff comes from in Sweden.

There is, in fact, formal censorship. I was at a dinner party having one of the precisely two drinks that Swedes have before the meal, when a guest arrived late. This is something no guest ever does in Sweden, not even if he died en route, though sometimes it can be hard to tell. The guest apologized sincerely. “I had to finish watching movies,” he said.

“Jurgen is a film censor,” said his dinner companion, also sincerely. Jurgen reassured me. “We’re only looking for violence,” he said. So
Showgirls
was okay, but
Hamlet
was out? “No, no, I don’t believe anything should be censored,” said the censor. “I’m looking for real violence—porno films where women are actually injured. And child pornography.” Wasn’t that more a matter for the police? And it was. But for some reason these moviemakers needed to be censored as well as arrested.

I’m sure I received a logical explanation. And I’m sure I don’t remember it. This is, after all, a country that maintains an entire national state-supported religion, complete with bishops, a synod, and pastors in every parish, and only 5 percent of the population goes to church.

There are huge, splendid, empty, idle houses of worship everywhere. I went to the Storkyrka (Great Church) behind the royal palace. The Storkyrka was consecrated in 1306. It was the site of coronations until 1907, when the Swedish monarchy decided that formal coronations were too la-di-da. Inside is a very big statue of St. George killing the dragon. This was carved from oak by Bernt Notke in 1489 in a manner extremely lifelike, right down to a well-whittled horse anus. (One can only speculate about the shoptalk among the apprentice sculptors to whom this task no doubt fell.) The dragon is rather more lifelike than necessary: a scale-armored, talon-freighted, fang-brandishing spiny reptoid frozen in midslither. It is a fine reminder of the high artistic skills of the Nordic Renaissance and also of Sweden’s strict attitude about drugs. Only 4 percent of Swedish high-school students have tried drugs even once, although the percentage may have been higher in 1489.

The only indication that the Storkyrka was used, other than by us tourists, was a little red table and six or eight wee plastic chairs. A day-care center had been set up right beneath the place where St. George’s lance was popping dragon slime, and you can hardly blame the tots if they never set foot in a church again.