You know I think it’s kind of funny that there’s such a tendency towards monopoly and power centralization in business, in order to “maximize efficiency”, when the main argument in favor of the free market, as I see it, is in favor of competition and innovation. It’s just funny that the competition doesn’t actually exist, and the innovation only comes about in the form of evergreened to shit intellectual property that further enforces a lack of competition.
their copes always revolve around with “but it’s actually the GOVERNMENT’S fault that we have monopolies and if we didn’t have all these LAWS like PATENTS and MINIMUM WAGE and REGULATIONS destroying SMALL BUSINESSES then we’d have a TRUE COMPETITIVE MARKET!” ignoring exactly what causes the government to be able to get to that point in the first place (spoiler alert: companies buy the government out, it’s inevitable in poorly-regulated capitalism)
source: me, regrettably a former libertarian “anarcho”-capitalist
We don’t have minimum wages here in Sweden. It’s regulated by negotiations between worker unions and companies. And the companies fucking hate it so much. Which is so funny because the government isn’t involved. It’s a free market, only the workers are part of it, and companies find that “totally not cool dude!”
We also have rent control functioning in a rather similar way, landlord unions and the tenant union negotiates rent increases on a yearly basis, and the landlords hate it. They’re actually free to raise the rent however they please, but the tenant union can take that to the rent court (or whatever it’s called) and if the increase is found to be unsubstantiated they’ll have to pay back the tenants.
I think that’s a solid model for democracy, but obviously companies hate it.
Sweden must be under constant attack by forgien governments that want to destabilize the country though. I know nothing about the politics of Sweden. Are the media companies run by propaganda groups like they are in most other countries?
I’d be curious how education works as well, most free economies can be broken by attacking education… it seems like there must be a ton of pressure to not have working examples of this kind of regulated capitalism in the world.
Is everyone taught to hate foreign workers that are lazy and also steal all the jobs?
I’m sincerely asking because it seems so bizarre to me that there are still functioning countries like that after all this globalization of wealth and greed.
Are the media companies run by propaganda groups like they are in most other countries?
Kind of. We have state media in the form of SVT (Sveriges Television) and SR (Sveriges Radio), and through lobbying they’ve been kind of hamstrung in the sense that they’re not allowed to compete with private media. In reality this means that articles from SVT tend to be rather terse. They’re good, but they never offer much in the way of details. On the other hand I feel like they’re typically very objective. There are never really opinions included in things.
Pretty much all publications have a political affiliation though, and that tends to colour headlines and such. It’s something to be aware of.
Then there are obviously smaller propaganda outlets. Samtiden for example is owned by the party Sverigedemokraterna and is highly influenced by their neo-nazi politics.
I’d be curious how education works as well, most free economies can be broken by attacking education… it seems like there must be a ton of pressure to not have working examples of this kind of regulated capitalism in the world.
Education is pretty regulated. Homeschooling like in the U.S. just isn’t a thing here. All children have a thing called “skolplikt” (duty to attend school), and while there are private schools, recently they’ve all fallen under really heavy scrutiny for not living up to the standards they’re expected to hold.
Private schools are publicly funded. I’m not 100% sure how all this works, but I believe each child has a certain sum tied to them, so if a child decides to attend private school, that sum goes to the private school. There’s likely also grants and such for schools, but school isn’t really something that’s on my mind a lot.
Private schools are more about different forms of education, like Waldorf or Montessori. There are also religious private schools. As far as I know, schools don’t charge individuals for attendance, so going to a private school isn’t really something prestigious here.
Schools are also expected to feed kids. Boggled my mind first time I heard of a kid having “school lunch debt”, the notion strikes me as ridiculous. Schools are meant to be safe spaces for learning and growth.
Is everyone taught to hate foreign workers that are lazy and also steal all the jobs?
Nah. This strikes me as the kind of thing your racist old grandpa might say.
That’s not to say that people don’t shit on foreign workers. I know Eastern Europeans aren’t very highly regarded among truckers, but I’ve also heard that they tend to be really incompetent and outright dangerous, not obeying traffic laws and whatnot, so I expect that at least some of the animosity is deserved.
It’s not all perfect though. I belive a union recently negotiated that ready personnel (so like, firefighters, ambulance, life rescue personnel etc.) got a rule through for forced downtime. Which sounds great in theory, but it effectively screws over smaller departments (like in my town) where they have a very small staff pool, and rely on people being on-call. Most of the time nothing comes from being on-call, but with forced rest they’d need to actually schedule people. I’m not 100% sure how it works, but the workers were not happy and several threatened to quit.
In my town they requested an exemption from these rules, and they got it through.
It seems like it’s a rule that’s really good for larger towns and cities, but in a small town like mine it just makes things harder.
Sweden is also by no means a perfect country. There are so many areas we could improve on. The housing market (like everywhere) is pretty rubbish. We have a lot of immigrants, but the integration efforts are incredibly half-arsed. We’re very digital, and you basically need a BankID to operate anything digitally here. For that you need to be registered at the tax office, and getting registered there can require you to hop through a bunch of hoops. It took my roomie almost 4 years to get properly registered an receive a social security ID.
There’s also barely anything that’s private information. If you knew my name, you could find out so much about me. How many vehicles I own, where I live, the size of my apartment, who my employer is, what I make, if I’ve been involved in any legal cases, if I’m politically engaged, if I own property, if so what, where, and how much it’s worth, if I have a car, then the make, colour, last time it was checked. My phone number (if that’s public, mine thankfully isn’t), my social security ID, etc. etc.
I heard of a case where a guy found out that he was legally declared dead when a letter arrived telling him so. Someone had basically signed a death certificate with his details, then they’d signed it as a doctor or whatever that didn’t exist, and submitted it to the right place. You’d think there’d be more checks and balances in place, but nope. It took the guy ages to get stuff at least partially sorted out, because shockingly there aren’t any procedures in places for when people magically stop being dead.
We also paid out social security to the defense minister of Iraq, so our systems definitely do get abused. The sad part being that when they restrict things and make these systems more conservative, people that really do need them end up getting hurt.
I’m a fan of capitalism, but it NEEDS heavy regulation to ensure competition. The playing field is not naturally level. Left to its own devices, the market insists on consolidation and monopoly.
I have a rough idea of the best way to do capitalism: if a company in a standard industry reaches monopoly (or oligopoly) stage, congratulations. You’ve won. The government should buy all your stock at above market rates, all the employees including the CEOs should get massive payouts. Huge taxpayer funded party. Golden parachutes for everyone. Giant bonuses to all of their contracted labor. And then the company or companies should be broken up into tiny pieces, assets sold off, all intellectual property revert to public domain, and leadership banned from pursuing business in that industry for a period of time.
I’ve seen that idea before, it’s not a bad one. I think there should also be the option to make it public in case it’s become a service that can only really work if centralised and is beneficial to the population. I’d still rather move to an entirely different system but if we have to keep capitalism something like this would be nice.
You know I think it’s kind of funny that there’s such a tendency towards monopoly and power centralization in business, in order to “maximize efficiency”, when the main argument in favor of the free market, as I see it, is in favor of competition and innovation. It’s just funny that the competition doesn’t actually exist, and the innovation only comes about in the form of evergreened to shit intellectual property that further enforces a lack of competition.
their copes always revolve around with “but it’s actually the GOVERNMENT’S fault that we have monopolies and if we didn’t have all these LAWS like PATENTS and MINIMUM WAGE and REGULATIONS destroying SMALL BUSINESSES then we’d have a TRUE COMPETITIVE MARKET!” ignoring exactly what causes the government to be able to get to that point in the first place (spoiler alert: companies buy the government out, it’s inevitable in poorly-regulated capitalism)
source: me, regrettably a former libertarian “anarcho”-capitalist
We don’t have minimum wages here in Sweden. It’s regulated by negotiations between worker unions and companies. And the companies fucking hate it so much. Which is so funny because the government isn’t involved. It’s a free market, only the workers are part of it, and companies find that “totally not cool dude!”
We also have rent control functioning in a rather similar way, landlord unions and the tenant union negotiates rent increases on a yearly basis, and the landlords hate it. They’re actually free to raise the rent however they please, but the tenant union can take that to the rent court (or whatever it’s called) and if the increase is found to be unsubstantiated they’ll have to pay back the tenants.
I think that’s a solid model for democracy, but obviously companies hate it.
Sweden must be under constant attack by forgien governments that want to destabilize the country though. I know nothing about the politics of Sweden. Are the media companies run by propaganda groups like they are in most other countries?
I’d be curious how education works as well, most free economies can be broken by attacking education… it seems like there must be a ton of pressure to not have working examples of this kind of regulated capitalism in the world.
Is everyone taught to hate foreign workers that are lazy and also steal all the jobs?
I’m sincerely asking because it seems so bizarre to me that there are still functioning countries like that after all this globalization of wealth and greed.
Kind of. We have state media in the form of SVT (Sveriges Television) and SR (Sveriges Radio), and through lobbying they’ve been kind of hamstrung in the sense that they’re not allowed to compete with private media. In reality this means that articles from SVT tend to be rather terse. They’re good, but they never offer much in the way of details. On the other hand I feel like they’re typically very objective. There are never really opinions included in things.
Pretty much all publications have a political affiliation though, and that tends to colour headlines and such. It’s something to be aware of.
Then there are obviously smaller propaganda outlets. Samtiden for example is owned by the party Sverigedemokraterna and is highly influenced by their neo-nazi politics.
Education is pretty regulated. Homeschooling like in the U.S. just isn’t a thing here. All children have a thing called “skolplikt” (duty to attend school), and while there are private schools, recently they’ve all fallen under really heavy scrutiny for not living up to the standards they’re expected to hold.
Private schools are publicly funded. I’m not 100% sure how all this works, but I believe each child has a certain sum tied to them, so if a child decides to attend private school, that sum goes to the private school. There’s likely also grants and such for schools, but school isn’t really something that’s on my mind a lot.
Private schools are more about different forms of education, like Waldorf or Montessori. There are also religious private schools. As far as I know, schools don’t charge individuals for attendance, so going to a private school isn’t really something prestigious here.
Schools are also expected to feed kids. Boggled my mind first time I heard of a kid having “school lunch debt”, the notion strikes me as ridiculous. Schools are meant to be safe spaces for learning and growth.
Nah. This strikes me as the kind of thing your racist old grandpa might say.
That’s not to say that people don’t shit on foreign workers. I know Eastern Europeans aren’t very highly regarded among truckers, but I’ve also heard that they tend to be really incompetent and outright dangerous, not obeying traffic laws and whatnot, so I expect that at least some of the animosity is deserved.
It’s not all perfect though. I belive a union recently negotiated that ready personnel (so like, firefighters, ambulance, life rescue personnel etc.) got a rule through for forced downtime. Which sounds great in theory, but it effectively screws over smaller departments (like in my town) where they have a very small staff pool, and rely on people being on-call. Most of the time nothing comes from being on-call, but with forced rest they’d need to actually schedule people. I’m not 100% sure how it works, but the workers were not happy and several threatened to quit. In my town they requested an exemption from these rules, and they got it through.
It seems like it’s a rule that’s really good for larger towns and cities, but in a small town like mine it just makes things harder.
Sweden is also by no means a perfect country. There are so many areas we could improve on. The housing market (like everywhere) is pretty rubbish. We have a lot of immigrants, but the integration efforts are incredibly half-arsed. We’re very digital, and you basically need a BankID to operate anything digitally here. For that you need to be registered at the tax office, and getting registered there can require you to hop through a bunch of hoops. It took my roomie almost 4 years to get properly registered an receive a social security ID.
There’s also barely anything that’s private information. If you knew my name, you could find out so much about me. How many vehicles I own, where I live, the size of my apartment, who my employer is, what I make, if I’ve been involved in any legal cases, if I’m politically engaged, if I own property, if so what, where, and how much it’s worth, if I have a car, then the make, colour, last time it was checked. My phone number (if that’s public, mine thankfully isn’t), my social security ID, etc. etc.
I heard of a case where a guy found out that he was legally declared dead when a letter arrived telling him so. Someone had basically signed a death certificate with his details, then they’d signed it as a doctor or whatever that didn’t exist, and submitted it to the right place. You’d think there’d be more checks and balances in place, but nope. It took the guy ages to get stuff at least partially sorted out, because shockingly there aren’t any procedures in places for when people magically stop being dead.
We also paid out social security to the defense minister of Iraq, so our systems definitely do get abused. The sad part being that when they restrict things and make these systems more conservative, people that really do need them end up getting hurt.
Wow thanks for the indepth response! I really appreciate the time you spent ☺️
Right? I gotta upvote for how thorough this post was, and it was interesting on top of that!
I’m a fan of capitalism, but it NEEDS heavy regulation to ensure competition. The playing field is not naturally level. Left to its own devices, the market insists on consolidation and monopoly.
I have a rough idea of the best way to do capitalism: if a company in a standard industry reaches monopoly (or oligopoly) stage, congratulations. You’ve won. The government should buy all your stock at above market rates, all the employees including the CEOs should get massive payouts. Huge taxpayer funded party. Golden parachutes for everyone. Giant bonuses to all of their contracted labor. And then the company or companies should be broken up into tiny pieces, assets sold off, all intellectual property revert to public domain, and leadership banned from pursuing business in that industry for a period of time.
I’ve seen that idea before, it’s not a bad one. I think there should also be the option to make it public in case it’s become a service that can only really work if centralised and is beneficial to the population. I’d still rather move to an entirely different system but if we have to keep capitalism something like this would be nice.
Innovation sometimes comes from government investment which is taxpayer funded but then the profits are kept private.