I was thinking about the Scandinavian social democracies, and why they're so good...

[originalpckelly]

And it dawned on me, what's really going on.

In these countries, large swaths of people are employed in the public sector, right?
People have massive taxation, right?

Wouldn't you tend to care more about government if a lot of your income came from it or went to it?

I was reading about Denmark, and the most recent data says that about 38% of the population works in the public sector. God damn, that's big. To give you some clue of how big a percentage, in the USA only two thirds of 1% work in the government (at the federal level, certainly it's higher for state/local government.)

So a ton of people have a real monetary reason to give a shit about government, but also, with so many people in government, it's hard to pay them off to make decisions for the richie rich's of the world.

The two biggest problems with representative government are solved in those countries. Rich people who invest and make money off of other people's labor get taxed by the government, and their wealth is redistributed again, instead of forming pools of power. It doesn't mean Denmark doesn't have rich people, their gini coefficient is still .26, not .01 or .00. It's just that money cannot long stay in the hands of the rich. It also means there aren't as many rich people with enough money to buy off the government, and of course the fact that it's 38% of the population added with this, sort of precludes widespread corruption. I read that Denmark is one of the least corrupt governments in the world, I suggest it is because of those two reasons.

The other problem in representative government is public apathy. There is a theory called regulatory capture, that basically is a historical analysis of regulatory authority as it is in America, it proposes a cycle:
1. Some company does something really shitty that pisses people off.
2. Politicians, fearing for their jobs, must pass laws creating regulators to try and prevent the shitty thing that pissed people off from happeing again.
3. Regulatory commissions/boards/etc. are created to make decisions on a daily basis about the implementation of the laws passed by Congress.
4. As public apathy sets in, the rich people can buy off the regulators or "capture" them by offering outright bribes, jobs to the members of the board once their terms are done, and they may even get corrupt politicians to select regulators who will pick industry insiders to put on the boards.
That is until something really shitty that pisses people off happens again, restarting the whole cycle.

This has been American regulation since the time of the Interstate Commerce Commission and it's policing of the railroads. As you can see, public apathy in a representative system, and therefore regulatory capture, is really averted in those social democracies for the aforementioned reasons.

And you can so easily see the problems with the American system:
1. Even if we have a representative government, the lack of actual public interest during good times ensures that the rich will capture the regulators (and even the representatives) of our government.
2. We have a massive gini coefficient problem, ours is twice that of Denmark, meaning we have twice as much wealth inequality in this country. Meaning that there are larger pools of money (or power) in the hands of fewer people. This leads to bad decisions being made with that money/power because individuals cannot rid themselves of their inherent imperfection.

These countries aren't perfect, though their governments are less corrupt, wealth is more evenly distributed, and people have health care. Despite those niceties, the economies of these countries are generally hurt by the high taxation regime. Growth is low, productivity is spotty, and unemployment usually is higher (something around 10%. I must note that the nation I was reading about, Denmark, has had a very low rate, only like 1.2% which is lower than the USA's.)

If 60-75% of your income went to pay for government, would you have as much impetus to work hard? If you do less work and you get the same amount of money (because a lot of your actual income comes back to you in social benefits either money or etc.) wouldn't you do less work?

There is another problem, too, with Denmark. In anything that isn't taxed to the nines, there is an unhealthy explosion of demand. They have a housing bubble there that's going to burst and kill the economy, because they've seen an explosion of people trying to own homes, because the money coming from the increase in one's home value is not taxed.

Does this mean we should adopt these forms of government? Perhaps, or perhaps not.

[patrice]

1. Job satisfaction needs to be represented in this somehow:

If 60-75% of your income went to pay for government, would you have as much impetus to work hard? If you do less work and you get the same amount of money (because a lot of your actual income comes back to you in social benefits either money or etc.) wouldn't you do less work?

People aren't widgetts. If they are doing something that they like and believe in they are quite likely to work just as hard or harder, or as hard as the situation requires, especially if they are working with others who are doing something that they like and believe in. This is something that the U.S.A. has forgotten. We reduce all values to money here and forget about the organic relationship between an organic entity and its empirical world.

[elleng]

2. And culture.

.

[patrice]

3. Right, I guess i referred to social group in working with others who share

one's interest and the value-belief that they place in the work, but, yes, there is that larger cultural context that brings things to the situation such as: the family relationships and educational standards that develop individual persons' interests and values within a set of cultural interests and values.