1970 and 1983. Taxes rose to stinking heights but not high enough to cover costs. Social services continued to expand without regard for budgets. As more people worked at government jobs where productivity was hard to measure, if not actively discouraged, centralized wage negotiations broke down. “Same pay for same kind of work” was replaced by “same pay for any kind of work.” Peter Stein, in his bluntly titled monograph Sweden: From Capitalist Success to Welfare-State Sclerosis, wrote, “Swedish doctors work an average of only 1,600 hours a year, compared to 2,800 worked by U.S. doctors. It pays doctors to stay home and paint their own houses rather than spend their time practicing medicine and hire painters.” A society is only slightly better off with its doctors painting houses than it is with its housepainters performing liver transplants. Until 1976 the Social Democrats had ruled alone or in coalition for forty-four years. They were socialists, so they figured Sweden’s success must be the result of socialism. The Social Democrats forgot that the Swedish Miracle was the result of fragile and elaborate compromises and also of, as Marita Ulvskog called it, “standing outside the war.” Nice phrase. Politicians had achieved control over the Swedish economy, but they were now trapped by their own power. The free market quit following the rules of economics and began following the rules of universal suffrage. The Social Democrats confess to it. “A ‘political market’ then emerged,” Mrs. Ulvskog said. “You had to give something to the voters. We couldn’t tell the voters we were going to cut.” The electoral process turned into a vote auction, with both socialist and nonsocialist parties upping the ante. “Going once . . . going twice . . . SOLD to the Social Democrats for free Ph.D.s and 100 percent disability benefits. Do I hear any bids for the next Parliament? Yes? The gentleman from the Liberal-Moderate coalition says lower taxes and more police.” Under such circumstances, even the best people, even the Swedes, could not resist the temptation to vote themselves more goods and services for less cost and bother. This may have been more naive than cynical. The Swedes seem to have no natural distrust of government. There is in Scandinavia a long tradition of communal decision making. The Vikings had an assembly of all adult males that met once or twice a year and was called the Thing, surely the best name ever for a legislative body. Swedish peasants always had some land-ownership rights, and they usually maintained friendly relations with their king. Class distinctions existed, but pesky nobles made their money more by war and trade than by
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