Any conversation between a liberal and a conservative
will eventually arrive at a moment equivalent to the following.
Liberal: “Sweden is able to
provide a strong social safety net and a strong capitalist economy, why can’t
we?”
Conservative: “We are not Sweden
and what the Swedish put up with would not be acceptable over here!”
But is that latter statement true? Sweden provides universal healthcare, education,
preschool childcare, and retirement income at moderate costs. Those are all things that voters claim would
be good for us to have in our country.
We tend to welcome and, eventually, cherish such benefits when they are
made available.
Thomas Piketty, in Capital and Ideology,
has returned with another masterpiece, this one investigating the economic
development paths taken by the various governmental entities throughout the
last several centuries. He concludes
that our socio-economic systems are arrived at by choices that we either make
or have imposed upon us. There are no
fundamental laws or other factors at work that naturally produce effects over
which we have no control. If we wish, we
can restructure our society in many different ways and still meet our needs.
“Inequality is neither economic
nor technical; it is ideological and political.
This is no doubt the most striking conclusion to emerge from the
historical approach I take in this book.
In other words, the market and competition, profits and wages, capital
and debt, skilled and unskilled workers, natives and aliens, tax havens and
competitiveness—none of these things exist as such. All are social and historical constructs,
which depend entirely on the legal, fiscal, educational, and political systems
that people choose to adopt and the conceptual definitions they choose to work
with. These choices are shaped by each
society’s conception of social justice and economic fairness and the relative
political and ideological power of contending groups and discourses. Importantly, this relative power is not
exclusively material; it is also intellectual and ideological.”
“The Swedish case is…interesting
because in the twentieth century the country became synonymous with social
democracy. The social democrats of the
SAP came to power in the early 1920s, when the party’s historical leader,
Hjamal Brenting, was elected prime minister.
The party subsequently held power more or less permanently from 1932 to
2006, and this long period in government allowed it to develop a very
sophisticated welfare and tax system, which in turn achieved one of the lowest
levels of inequality ever observed anywhere.
People therefore often think of Sweden as a country that has always been
inherently egalitarian. This is not
true: until the early twentieth century Sweden was a profoundly inegalitarian
country, in some respects more inegalitarian than countries elsewhere in
Europe; or, rather, it was more sophisticated in organizing its inequality and
more systematic in expressing its proprietary ideology and shaping its
institutional incarnation.”
We do not have to be tomorrow who we are today. And for the purposes of the current
discussion, Sweden was not the Sweden we know today until it became the Sweden
we know today.
Until the late nineteenth century, Sweden was a monarchy
with a curious political makeup consisting of four components: “the nobility,
the clergy, the urban bourgeoisie, and the landowning peasantry.” Representatives of these classes obtained the
relative right to vote in its parliament, the Riksdag proportional to the
amount of taxes they had paid. Economic
systems can be categorized by the manner in which they treat private
property. In the most conservative
systems, private property is elevated to one the highest rights, if not the
highest. In this era, property implied
income, from which taxes followed; and it was this contribution to taxation
that defined one’s political power. This notion that from wealth flowed
political power became even more firmly established around 1865.
“The quaternary Riksdag regime
was replaced in 1865-1866 by a censitary parliament with two chambers: an upper
house elected by a small minority of large property owners (barely 9,000
electors, less than 1 percent of the adult male population), and a lower house,
also censitary but considerably more open in that roughly 20 percent of adult males
were entitled to vote for its members.”
The term censitary refers to making voting dependent on a
property or tax qualification.
“What was unique about the
censitary system in effect in Sweden from 1865 to 1911 was that the number of
votes each voter could cast depended on the size of that voter’s tax payments,
property, and income. The men
sufficiently wealthy to vote for elections for the lower house were divided
into forty-odd groups, and each group was assigned a different electoral weight. Specifically, each member of the least
wealthy group could cast one vote, while each member of the wealthiest group
could cast as many as fifty-four votes.”
“A similar system applied to
municipal elections in Sweden in the period 1862-1909, with the additional
wrinkle that corporations also had the right to vote in local elections, again
casting a number of ballots that depended on their tax payments, property, and
profits. No voter in an urban municipal election,
whether a private individual or a corporation, could cast more than one hundred
ballots. In rural towns, however, there
was no such ceiling; indeed, in the municipal elections of 1871, there were
fifty-four rural towns in Sweden where one voter cast more than 50 percent of
the votes. Among these perfectly legitimate
democratic dictators was the prime minister himself…”
If one thinks of this as a crazy system completely
divorced from democratic principles, Piketty reminds us that the United States,
driven by ideological fervor, has been moving in a similar direction.
“Of course, no one today is
proposing that the right to vote should depend explicitly on wealth…Nevertheless,
recent years have witnessed the development of various doctrines and ideologies,
most notably in the US Supreme Court, whose purpose is to eliminate ceilings on
private contributions to political campaigns; this is tantamount to granting potentially
unlimited electoral influence to the wealthiest individuals. The issue of limiting the power of wealth
also comes up in relation to jurisdictional inequalities: for instance, certain
disputes are now subject to private arbitration, which allows the wealthy to
avoid judgement by the public court system.
Access to higher education is also influenced by wealth: many American
and international universities give special consideration to the children of
wealthy donors…”
We are at a unique point in our history. Combined health and economic crises are
bearing down on us as we head into an incredibly important election. By the end of this year, things will have
changed—for the better or the worse. Sweden’s
example should give us hope. If one has
specific changes in mind, one should promote those changes through party
politics and party voting. One can be
sure that those opposing those changes will be doing the same. Piketty provides these words of advice.
“…the very rapid transformation
that took place in Sweden demonstrates the importance of popular mobilization,
political parties, and reformist programs in the transformation of inequality
regimes. When conditions are right,
these processes can lead to rapid radical transformation by legal parliamentary
means, without violent upheaval.”
Or, things can get even worse…
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