The cyber-uglies take on Finland: Part II
Part II: Freerider Phil
NB: Part I of this three-part series can be read here.
Phil Schwarzmann hails from Baltimore (poverty rate 23%). He left this decaying American city that 'exports its most talented young adults' in 2001 to settle down in Espoo, Finland's second largest and probably most affluent city (poverty rate 1%), where he now works for Nokia.
Like Finnpundit, he's a strident conservative, albeit one of the conscientiously antisocial ('libertarian'/'objectivist') variety. That means he rails not just against the welfare state but also gets mighty prickly about the state sticking its nose into places he thinks it shouldn't. (Funny how libertarians and 'objectivists' always seem to have Jewish surnames. Not that Schwarzmann is Jewish. See NOTE 1 below)
Schwarzmann has maintained his weblog Finland for Thought since March 2004 (hmmm, just a month before Finnpundit went online - the spring of 2004 must have been a good season for Finnophobes). Because I try to be fair, even when writing about people who espouse doctrines as corrosive of the public good as those of libertarianism, I have to concede that Schwarzmann's blog is much more interesting than Finnpundit's. Finnpundit has no knowledge of contemporary Finland so you won't learn anything about the place from reading it. Since he's been living in Finland for a few years, Schwarzmann is capable of offering occasional insights into this famously reserved culture. However, he does seem to be too socially isolated, perhaps on account of his lack of competency in Finnish, that he's rarely more than frivolously entertaining. (Elaine Ashton, an American woman living with her Finnish husband in Helsinki, offers much more by way of insight into life in Finland today. See her personal website.)
The fare at this allegedly popular blog (Schwarzmann boasts 48,000 hits per week, as many as OpEdNews, which admittedly strikes me as absolutely incredible) are the predictable rightwing targets: strikers, welfare, gender equality programmes, those who express discontent with globalization, Michael Moore, sick leave, Morgan Spurlock, the Kyoto Protocols, government spending, government patronage of national culture, leftwing university professors etc. etc. etc. But, because Phil is a 'libertarian,' you have to add to the usual swill such targets as national service and smoking restrictions.
The more I waded through the fare on offer, the more I found myself wondering what Schwarzmann is actually doing in Finland. Judging by his political views, he's a dyed-in-the-wool reactionary who, rather than living in the country which is close to the top in both environmental and corruption indexes (least corruption, not most!), could only ever find true happiness living in pollution-laden Texas working on new software fixes Diebold Corp. can use to steal the next presidential election. To penetrate the mystery, I set myself the task of reading Schwarzmann's blog in depth. Normally I wouldn't waste my time trawling through pages and pages of stock rightwing fare, but I tend to be like a dog with a bone and don't give up until my curiosity is sated. Finally, the entry for January 22, 2005 yielded what I was looking for:
'Sometimes people can get the wrong impression about my thoughts on Finland. Just because I critique [sic] the government, doesn’t mean I hate the nation [sic] of Finland. News tends to always be negative [?], and my blog can sometimes (okay, always) certainly look that way. But I absolutely love Finland, especially Finnish culture and the Finnish people. I think that the Finnish people is what makes Finland so great. I plan to stay in Finland forever. Yeah, I miss a lot of stuff from the states, but if I were to return home I’d miss a whole lot more.'
At this stage of the game, Schwarzmann promised to introduce a new series, focusing on all the things that make Finland great. Schwarzmann subsequently produced a strand of blog entries that offered some insight into his views. What he likes, it turns out, are: (see entries 1 and 2) Finland's low crime rate - not a big surprise when you know that Schwarzmann hails from the city with the highest murder rate in the US; (entry 3) that young people working in boring low-skilled jobs seem to be a lot happier about it than young people in the same boat in the US; and (entry 4) that young Finns are more likely than young Americans to aspire towards jobs they feel 'passionate' about.
How Schwarzmann squares these observations with his abhorrence of the Finnish welfare state, I have no idea. I would have thought that it was pretty obvious that these things were all by-products of the Finnish welfare state. OK, you don't have to have an advanced welfare state to have a low crime rate - Japan, we all know, has a relatively low crime rate - but that's either a culture-bound exception or a beneficial by-product of Japan's unique postwar corporate welfare state. Normally, though, it does a great deal to reduce crime if people don't have to resort to crime to keep body and soul together. (That's why juvenile crime soared in Australia in the late 1990s, after the conservative government of John Howard abolished unemployment assistance income for young people shortly after it took office in 1996. I had my house broken into and my laptop stolen by a homeless kid a few years later. Australia's growing reluctance to provide young people with social assistance is one of the reasons why youth suicide rates here reached an all-time high in the late 1990s.)
As for the other two things Schwarzmann likes about Finland, they simply demonstrate how well this supposed monstrosity the Finnish welfare state works to the benefit of young people. In objectivist lore, the welfare state is bad because it helps 'the poor,' thereby discouraging them from pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps. But the welfare state does a great deal more than helping poor people (unfortunately, helping the poor is in most real world welfare states not that high a priority): more often, it helps the young, the ill and the old. In other words, rightwing criticism of the welfare state misses the mark because it narrowly focuses on income redistribution: in practice, the welfare state is an instrument less for redistributing income from rich to 'poor' than for redistributing income and opportunity across the life cycle (and, in the case of unemployment, across the work cycle). Instead of treating this as some kind of paternalistic conspiracy, I would call this doing what humans normally do, which is try to improve on our natural circumstances, just as our remote ancestors did when they built the first rooves to protect themselves from the elements.
Schwarzmann acknowledges that young people are better off in Finland than in the U.S., but does not follow through on the point because it would oblige him to survey the great success of the Finnish welfare state. This is a big fat mountain parked right in the middle of the road he's travelling on, only he refuses to see it. The fact is that people such as students doing low-skilled jobs in Finland are paid much better than people doing equivalent jobs in the US. (Incidentally, Schwarzmann didn't even look into the matter to find out - he assumes, wrongly as it happens, that their wages are about the same. See NOTE 2) What's more, with a free education system most every young person in Finland is able to aspire to the kinds of jobs working class American kids (along with their peers in Australia, Britain and Canada) haven't seriously been able to aspire towards since the 70s. (For the Finns bothering to read this, in most English-speaking countries today, all the jobs worth having go to those from rich backgrounds whose parents have the necessary contacts. Without contacts, you haven't got a chance. That's why 25,000 people applied for 325 crappy low-paid jobs at a newly opened Wal-Mart in a Chicago suburb recently.)
What Schwarzmann fails to get is that advanced welfare states like those of Sweden and Finland actually enlarge the scope of personal freedom for the overwhelming majority of the people. Not 'most' people but something of the order of 95 percent or more of them. What libertarians like Schwarzmann misrepresent as a form of social organization constituting a threat to liberty, the welfare state is, in fact, the only form of social organization that has ever managed to establish extremely high levels of freedom for the vast majority of the population within the context of a capitalist economic system. The welfare state is the sine qua non for a meaningful degree of freedom in a society that still lacks the wherewithal to discard its capitalist straitjacket.
Since Schwarzmann concedes that he 'absolutely loves' Finland you'd think that he'd have figured out by now that the way Finland is has everything to do with the way it's been governed. For one thing, he says in his online resume that he came to Finland because he wanted to live 'in the worlds [sic] most technologically advanced country.' Well, as the Finland Project - an American-sponsored education project for Finnish primary schoolchildren personally endorsed by Laura Bush, no less - points out, Finland's advanced economy is the result of farsighted government investment back in the 80s: 'In the 1980's, Finland decided to spend lots of money to educate worldclass engineers and doctors. When educated and competitive people were encouraged to learn, research, and experiment, the results were remarkable. Everyday life changed forever.' My impression is that Schwarzmann thinks Finland's advanced and internationally-competitive IT sector was a product of the 'free market.' (I wonder if he still believes in Santa Claus?)
Although Schwarzmann would seem to have a lot to thank Finland for - after all, going from Baltimore to Espoo is a big step up in the world - Schwarzmann insists on biting the hand that feeds him. Schwarzmann, to be blunt, is what Finnpundit would call a 'free rider'; thanks to his relationship with a Finnish exchange student - it was his connection with her that led to his decision to settle in Finland - he enjoys all the benefits of life in the contemporary Finnish welfare state without ever having done anything to earn them, and the fact that he does this at the same time as he's preaching ideas that seem intended to subvert it makes it a case of sheer chutzpah if ever there was one. By choosing Finland over the U.S., he's appropriated for himself something that was built by two generations of Finns imbued with solid collectivist instincts. Hundreds of millions of human beings have lived and died on this planet suffering from every kind of malady and oppressed by every kind of tyranny, and 99.999999999999 percent of them would have given an arm and a leg to live in a peaceful, prosperous, healthy, safe society like modern, social democratic Finland. Yet all Schwarzmann can think of to do with his fleeting existence on earth is knock the constructive efforts of others.
The conclusion I drew, as I closed Phil's blog for the last time, is that he and his ilk - i.e., the libertarian blogger railing about the evils of the welfare state - are simply the latest incarnation of the proverbial Ugly American. What seems to underlie the onslaught of the American cyber-uglies against the advanced welfare state is their lack of real education. While Finnpundit's understanding of macroeconomics is absolutely laughable - which I have learned from experience is not all that unusual for businessmen - Schwarzmann's blog reads as if he has no knowledge of European history at all. He seems to live in some ideological solipsism in which the epic history of the human struggle to create livable societies against tyrants seeking to monopolize all the social goods for themselves may as well never have taken place at all. This would all be very well if he was living - where he belongs, really - in some crumbling-down American city sharply divided between haves and have nots. But isn't he evading the consequences of his own philosophy by living the good life in a country founded on collectivist principles?
NOTE 1: Schwarzmann is a Jewish (Ashkenazic) name, a variant spelling of Schwarzman. However, here Schwarzmann describes himself here as a 'recovering Catholic.' The founder of American libertarianism was Murray Rothbard, who was Jewish. The founder of objectivism was a Russian Jewess, Ayn Rand, and her most famous disciple, Alan Greenspan, is also Jewish.
NOTE 2: In 1994, in an effort to reduce youth unemployment, the Finnish government passed a law allowing employers to pay young persons lower than minimum wages. However, the law was rescinded the following year, because it turned out that it had made no difference - employers did not recruit young people even for lower wages. Since 1995, therefore, young Finns working in low-wage service jobs and temporary jobs have been paid at least regular minimum wages. (SOURCE)
As it happens, minimum wages in Finland vary by industry, but they are roughly of the same level as throughout the rest of northern Europe, i.e., 1000-1300 Euros a month. 'In the United States, on the other hand, the Federal minimum wage is 877 euro, though a number of individual States have a higher minimum wage.' (SOURCE) Even if minimum wages in Finland were as low as they are in the US, young Finns would still be much better off. That's because they don't have to worry about health care or fret about their education, as both are free in Finland. In the U.S., low-paid workers miss out on health care benefits and have to take out loans to fund their education that cripple them for years afterwards.
Here's a typical example of the unfortunate young person living this kind of life: 'Katie Salas, a 24 year-old student at City College of San Francisco, has had 20 jobs in the last five years. She has worked in restaurants, shoe stores, clothing stores, bars, Macy's and a museum. Katie has been forced to work unpaid hours off the clock, was denied vacation days and lied to about receiving commissions that never showed up in her paycheck. While working at the Cheesecake Factory, the pace was so frenzied that breaks were rare. She and fellow employees would fight over who got to clean the bathrooms just so they could sit in the stall and rest. Though City College is a two-year school, she is in her fifth year because she can only afford to take two classes per semester.' (SOURCE)
If I were Katie Salas, I think I'd want to punch Finnpundit, Phil Schwarzmann and the other detractors of the Finnish welfare state in the nose.
Phil freeriding in Tapiola, Finland. Sure beats crummy Baltimore, hey Phil?
Coming next: Part III: Schwarzmann thinks the Cold War is still on!
NB: Part I of this three-part series can be read here.
Phil Schwarzmann hails from Baltimore (poverty rate 23%). He left this decaying American city that 'exports its most talented young adults' in 2001 to settle down in Espoo, Finland's second largest and probably most affluent city (poverty rate 1%), where he now works for Nokia.
Like Finnpundit, he's a strident conservative, albeit one of the conscientiously antisocial ('libertarian'/'objectivist') variety. That means he rails not just against the welfare state but also gets mighty prickly about the state sticking its nose into places he thinks it shouldn't. (Funny how libertarians and 'objectivists' always seem to have Jewish surnames. Not that Schwarzmann is Jewish. See NOTE 1 below)
Schwarzmann has maintained his weblog Finland for Thought since March 2004 (hmmm, just a month before Finnpundit went online - the spring of 2004 must have been a good season for Finnophobes). Because I try to be fair, even when writing about people who espouse doctrines as corrosive of the public good as those of libertarianism, I have to concede that Schwarzmann's blog is much more interesting than Finnpundit's. Finnpundit has no knowledge of contemporary Finland so you won't learn anything about the place from reading it. Since he's been living in Finland for a few years, Schwarzmann is capable of offering occasional insights into this famously reserved culture. However, he does seem to be too socially isolated, perhaps on account of his lack of competency in Finnish, that he's rarely more than frivolously entertaining. (Elaine Ashton, an American woman living with her Finnish husband in Helsinki, offers much more by way of insight into life in Finland today. See her personal website.)
The fare at this allegedly popular blog (Schwarzmann boasts 48,000 hits per week, as many as OpEdNews, which admittedly strikes me as absolutely incredible) are the predictable rightwing targets: strikers, welfare, gender equality programmes, those who express discontent with globalization, Michael Moore, sick leave, Morgan Spurlock, the Kyoto Protocols, government spending, government patronage of national culture, leftwing university professors etc. etc. etc. But, because Phil is a 'libertarian,' you have to add to the usual swill such targets as national service and smoking restrictions.
The more I waded through the fare on offer, the more I found myself wondering what Schwarzmann is actually doing in Finland. Judging by his political views, he's a dyed-in-the-wool reactionary who, rather than living in the country which is close to the top in both environmental and corruption indexes (least corruption, not most!), could only ever find true happiness living in pollution-laden Texas working on new software fixes Diebold Corp. can use to steal the next presidential election. To penetrate the mystery, I set myself the task of reading Schwarzmann's blog in depth. Normally I wouldn't waste my time trawling through pages and pages of stock rightwing fare, but I tend to be like a dog with a bone and don't give up until my curiosity is sated. Finally, the entry for January 22, 2005 yielded what I was looking for:
'Sometimes people can get the wrong impression about my thoughts on Finland. Just because I critique [sic] the government, doesn’t mean I hate the nation [sic] of Finland. News tends to always be negative [?], and my blog can sometimes (okay, always) certainly look that way. But I absolutely love Finland, especially Finnish culture and the Finnish people. I think that the Finnish people is what makes Finland so great. I plan to stay in Finland forever. Yeah, I miss a lot of stuff from the states, but if I were to return home I’d miss a whole lot more.'
At this stage of the game, Schwarzmann promised to introduce a new series, focusing on all the things that make Finland great. Schwarzmann subsequently produced a strand of blog entries that offered some insight into his views. What he likes, it turns out, are: (see entries 1 and 2) Finland's low crime rate - not a big surprise when you know that Schwarzmann hails from the city with the highest murder rate in the US; (entry 3) that young people working in boring low-skilled jobs seem to be a lot happier about it than young people in the same boat in the US; and (entry 4) that young Finns are more likely than young Americans to aspire towards jobs they feel 'passionate' about.
How Schwarzmann squares these observations with his abhorrence of the Finnish welfare state, I have no idea. I would have thought that it was pretty obvious that these things were all by-products of the Finnish welfare state. OK, you don't have to have an advanced welfare state to have a low crime rate - Japan, we all know, has a relatively low crime rate - but that's either a culture-bound exception or a beneficial by-product of Japan's unique postwar corporate welfare state. Normally, though, it does a great deal to reduce crime if people don't have to resort to crime to keep body and soul together. (That's why juvenile crime soared in Australia in the late 1990s, after the conservative government of John Howard abolished unemployment assistance income for young people shortly after it took office in 1996. I had my house broken into and my laptop stolen by a homeless kid a few years later. Australia's growing reluctance to provide young people with social assistance is one of the reasons why youth suicide rates here reached an all-time high in the late 1990s.)
As for the other two things Schwarzmann likes about Finland, they simply demonstrate how well this supposed monstrosity the Finnish welfare state works to the benefit of young people. In objectivist lore, the welfare state is bad because it helps 'the poor,' thereby discouraging them from pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps. But the welfare state does a great deal more than helping poor people (unfortunately, helping the poor is in most real world welfare states not that high a priority): more often, it helps the young, the ill and the old. In other words, rightwing criticism of the welfare state misses the mark because it narrowly focuses on income redistribution: in practice, the welfare state is an instrument less for redistributing income from rich to 'poor' than for redistributing income and opportunity across the life cycle (and, in the case of unemployment, across the work cycle). Instead of treating this as some kind of paternalistic conspiracy, I would call this doing what humans normally do, which is try to improve on our natural circumstances, just as our remote ancestors did when they built the first rooves to protect themselves from the elements.
Schwarzmann acknowledges that young people are better off in Finland than in the U.S., but does not follow through on the point because it would oblige him to survey the great success of the Finnish welfare state. This is a big fat mountain parked right in the middle of the road he's travelling on, only he refuses to see it. The fact is that people such as students doing low-skilled jobs in Finland are paid much better than people doing equivalent jobs in the US. (Incidentally, Schwarzmann didn't even look into the matter to find out - he assumes, wrongly as it happens, that their wages are about the same. See NOTE 2) What's more, with a free education system most every young person in Finland is able to aspire to the kinds of jobs working class American kids (along with their peers in Australia, Britain and Canada) haven't seriously been able to aspire towards since the 70s. (For the Finns bothering to read this, in most English-speaking countries today, all the jobs worth having go to those from rich backgrounds whose parents have the necessary contacts. Without contacts, you haven't got a chance. That's why 25,000 people applied for 325 crappy low-paid jobs at a newly opened Wal-Mart in a Chicago suburb recently.)
What Schwarzmann fails to get is that advanced welfare states like those of Sweden and Finland actually enlarge the scope of personal freedom for the overwhelming majority of the people. Not 'most' people but something of the order of 95 percent or more of them. What libertarians like Schwarzmann misrepresent as a form of social organization constituting a threat to liberty, the welfare state is, in fact, the only form of social organization that has ever managed to establish extremely high levels of freedom for the vast majority of the population within the context of a capitalist economic system. The welfare state is the sine qua non for a meaningful degree of freedom in a society that still lacks the wherewithal to discard its capitalist straitjacket.
Since Schwarzmann concedes that he 'absolutely loves' Finland you'd think that he'd have figured out by now that the way Finland is has everything to do with the way it's been governed. For one thing, he says in his online resume that he came to Finland because he wanted to live 'in the worlds [sic] most technologically advanced country.' Well, as the Finland Project - an American-sponsored education project for Finnish primary schoolchildren personally endorsed by Laura Bush, no less - points out, Finland's advanced economy is the result of farsighted government investment back in the 80s: 'In the 1980's, Finland decided to spend lots of money to educate worldclass engineers and doctors. When educated and competitive people were encouraged to learn, research, and experiment, the results were remarkable. Everyday life changed forever.' My impression is that Schwarzmann thinks Finland's advanced and internationally-competitive IT sector was a product of the 'free market.' (I wonder if he still believes in Santa Claus?)
Although Schwarzmann would seem to have a lot to thank Finland for - after all, going from Baltimore to Espoo is a big step up in the world - Schwarzmann insists on biting the hand that feeds him. Schwarzmann, to be blunt, is what Finnpundit would call a 'free rider'; thanks to his relationship with a Finnish exchange student - it was his connection with her that led to his decision to settle in Finland - he enjoys all the benefits of life in the contemporary Finnish welfare state without ever having done anything to earn them, and the fact that he does this at the same time as he's preaching ideas that seem intended to subvert it makes it a case of sheer chutzpah if ever there was one. By choosing Finland over the U.S., he's appropriated for himself something that was built by two generations of Finns imbued with solid collectivist instincts. Hundreds of millions of human beings have lived and died on this planet suffering from every kind of malady and oppressed by every kind of tyranny, and 99.999999999999 percent of them would have given an arm and a leg to live in a peaceful, prosperous, healthy, safe society like modern, social democratic Finland. Yet all Schwarzmann can think of to do with his fleeting existence on earth is knock the constructive efforts of others.
The conclusion I drew, as I closed Phil's blog for the last time, is that he and his ilk - i.e., the libertarian blogger railing about the evils of the welfare state - are simply the latest incarnation of the proverbial Ugly American. What seems to underlie the onslaught of the American cyber-uglies against the advanced welfare state is their lack of real education. While Finnpundit's understanding of macroeconomics is absolutely laughable - which I have learned from experience is not all that unusual for businessmen - Schwarzmann's blog reads as if he has no knowledge of European history at all. He seems to live in some ideological solipsism in which the epic history of the human struggle to create livable societies against tyrants seeking to monopolize all the social goods for themselves may as well never have taken place at all. This would all be very well if he was living - where he belongs, really - in some crumbling-down American city sharply divided between haves and have nots. But isn't he evading the consequences of his own philosophy by living the good life in a country founded on collectivist principles?
NOTE 1: Schwarzmann is a Jewish (Ashkenazic) name, a variant spelling of Schwarzman. However, here Schwarzmann describes himself here as a 'recovering Catholic.' The founder of American libertarianism was Murray Rothbard, who was Jewish. The founder of objectivism was a Russian Jewess, Ayn Rand, and her most famous disciple, Alan Greenspan, is also Jewish.
NOTE 2: In 1994, in an effort to reduce youth unemployment, the Finnish government passed a law allowing employers to pay young persons lower than minimum wages. However, the law was rescinded the following year, because it turned out that it had made no difference - employers did not recruit young people even for lower wages. Since 1995, therefore, young Finns working in low-wage service jobs and temporary jobs have been paid at least regular minimum wages. (SOURCE)
As it happens, minimum wages in Finland vary by industry, but they are roughly of the same level as throughout the rest of northern Europe, i.e., 1000-1300 Euros a month. 'In the United States, on the other hand, the Federal minimum wage is 877 euro, though a number of individual States have a higher minimum wage.' (SOURCE) Even if minimum wages in Finland were as low as they are in the US, young Finns would still be much better off. That's because they don't have to worry about health care or fret about their education, as both are free in Finland. In the U.S., low-paid workers miss out on health care benefits and have to take out loans to fund their education that cripple them for years afterwards.
Here's a typical example of the unfortunate young person living this kind of life: 'Katie Salas, a 24 year-old student at City College of San Francisco, has had 20 jobs in the last five years. She has worked in restaurants, shoe stores, clothing stores, bars, Macy's and a museum. Katie has been forced to work unpaid hours off the clock, was denied vacation days and lied to about receiving commissions that never showed up in her paycheck. While working at the Cheesecake Factory, the pace was so frenzied that breaks were rare. She and fellow employees would fight over who got to clean the bathrooms just so they could sit in the stall and rest. Though City College is a two-year school, she is in her fifth year because she can only afford to take two classes per semester.' (SOURCE)
If I were Katie Salas, I think I'd want to punch Finnpundit, Phil Schwarzmann and the other detractors of the Finnish welfare state in the nose.
Phil freeriding in Tapiola, Finland. Sure beats crummy Baltimore, hey Phil?
Coming next: Part III: Schwarzmann thinks the Cold War is still on!
