If you’re a citizen or legal resident of a Nordic country, you’ll get paid basic subsistence when you have no other income. In Finland this is around 500 euros / month.
There are lots of empty houses in the remote countryside in Finland (and I presume the same is true for parts of Sweden and Norway). You can probably rent something for next to nothing, or even make a deal with the owner to stay for free in exchange for keeping the place up. Many of these houses are owned by inheritors living in cities, so finding the owner is a bit of work but solvable through public registries.
One problem is that you’d be living somewhere remote, so you should enjoy solitude and winter darkness, and you need to budget for a car and fuel out of that 500 € or have a really solid plan for self-subsistence so you don’t need to make trips to town.
Owning a property comes with property taxes. And will make you ineligible for a lot of the benefits.
And speaking of said benefits, it's a part time job keeping up with the paperwork.
And the Nordics are a cold place, you either need to own some forest or pay for firewood and/or electricity or heating oil. Forest property is quite expensive.
There's no way you could live in a cheap house in the Nordic countryside for "free" or even cheap.
You have no idea what you're talking about, do you?
Property taxes in remote locations are not very high. Neither are rents in dying villages. Living off the free 500 euros a month is certainly doable here in Finland, and, in fact, regrettably many people do it.
Keeping up with the paperwork, at least here in Finland, is also a very small amount of work. Like two hours once a month or something.
I think it's not an accident that we have quite a bit higher unemployment rate than the Anglosphere.
Finland is full of cottages and remote houses where the property tax is on the order of 100 € / year. The owners are mostly living far away, having inherited the remote house which perhaps has some sentimental family value but barely any resale value. I don’t think it would be terribly hard to find a place like this to rent for a bit of money and upkeep work.
It’s called living on the dole, most western countries have social security like this. It’s not really meant for long term living but as a safety net for periods when you might find yourself unemployed.
Also, most countries have very cheap housing in the countryside/remote areas, in northern countries you have to factor in heating costs which can be several hundred euros/month during the (long) winter.
Presenting a one sentence expression of a value judgment as if it were a fact will tend to attract downvotes, because that doesn’t add any interesting perspective or information for anyone to take away other than they know your opinion on an individual topic. (Or they would, if they knew exactly what you were referring to with the unanchored pronoun. Are you referring to the state support program, the use of the state program to live indefinitely, or something else?)
It never occurred to me that someone would disagree with that statement, I just wrote this as some kind of reminder and did not think that it was necessary to elaborate. You take money to finance your life instead of working for it, money for which other people worked and which they provide to help others through hard times.
> EDIT: As this is collecting downvotes quite quickly, would any of the downvoters care to explain their stance?
No, it works the other way round: you should explain why you find it immoral, then we can explain why we disagree (or maybe agree) with you. Otherwise you will only get a downvote.
I did this in response to the first comment. [1] I did not elaborate on this in my first comment because I did not anticipate that this would be a contentious statement.
Only if you accept that the system itself is moral. If you think it's an oppressive power structure that violently conquered traditional, small scale communities and forced them to live under its thumb, I think there's nothing wrong with abusing the abuser.
That support comes with requirements and they will try to get you "reintegrated" and into a job so that you can support yourself. To use it as a salary with no intention to work is not according to the purpose of this service.
Another way to look at this would be in the context of subsidies aimed at less populated areas of the country.
A lot of people are concerned about the countryside going empty, and there are various policies aimed at reversing or at least halting that. They are necessarily income-transfer programs where cities subsidize the countryside.
An individual getting paid 500 euros to live in a remote area doesn’t seem like a bad deal in that context. It’s a much more measurable outcome than many of these other programs, at least.
But somehow giving money to an individual is much more morally controversial than giving money to a larger collective like a province or state. For example, Republicans generally don’t have a problem with federal programs that transfer income from rich states like California and New York to poor states like Alabama and Mississippi. But they would absolutely oppose similar income transfer on a personal level.
> A lot of people are concerned about the countryside going empty, and there are various policies aimed at reversing or at least halting that. They are necessarily income-transfer programs where cities subsidize the countryside.
I wonder why. I would love to empty and re-wild more countryside.
Would the aim of such programs not be to have a working society in those less populated areas instead of just filling it with non-working people completely dependent on others?
People change. Especially for young people, I personally think it’s valuable to give them opportunities that are not immediately productive.
If you could get a 21-year-old to move into the countryside, it might have significant long-term upside even if the person appears like a slacker right now. They could find a spouse and have kids. They could come up with an online business (which might still look like “slacking at a computer” to most of the world). They could eventually do local volunteer work that is important but can’t get done at market prices. There’s a lot of ways that a young person’s life can go.
For older people the equation is a bit different for obvious reasons. But most government programs can’t discriminate by age, so you’d have to aim at a compromise.
Sure, but that is for the people that finance the basic subsidence to deside, they decide what they expect in return. If they want to give the money unconditionally, fine, then it would of course not be immoral to take them up on the offer. I do not know what the Norwegian rules say, so maybe it is like that. On the other if you structure it like that, you open yourself up for exploitation by people who could work but prefer not to. And this could very well make them reconsider the conditions or make the entire thing unsustainable.
It is something that is be interested to read about - using a basic stipend to redistrube wealth, to try and offset soloing (as in cities), which would (theoretically) help revitalise country towns (with more locals able to spend cash locally)
An addition would be to create various centres to allow people to learn new skills and eventually reenter the workforce
Not OP, but imo, these subsidies exists so that people who have issues can get by. And that is a good thing.
Just making decision to live off that and spend time doing hobbies is abusing good thing and asocial. People who openly advocate for something like that are endangering existence of those programs for those who really need it because of mental health or physical issues.
Moreover, those programs typically comes with social workers and requirements designed to make you change your life. You should cooperate with that goal so that you cease to be so dependent.
The inverse perspective is that you have been forced to not be able to finance yourself and I have both theory and evidence that this is true for a non zero percentage of the population. In that sense, not spending "other people's money" was never an option to begin with.
Instead of using a framing that sees other people as parasites, I prefer to see it as a bribe to people to get them away from me and leave me alone.
If they are truly just the fruits of your labor, and the society contributed nothing, you are free to move to a zero-tax third world country and live there.
And if society did contribute more to your work than these taxes cost — which it likely did, considering you didn't move to a third world country yet — then society is free to take its fair share in return.
Why is coercion the chosen course and not voluntarism?
I actually like your reply the most. You almost proudly admit to being in favor of violence against your fellow man but didn't quite get there. I'll help finish your thought:
> then society is free to take its fair share in return. And if you don't give up what society thinks is fair, then society will imprison you and if you resist their agents, society will authorize them to kill you.
You are again free to leave. It's a relatively simple social contract. If you take something from society, you'll have to pay for it.
If I go into a walmart and take products off the shelf, Walmart also expects that I'll pay, and will enforce that under threat of violence.
I'd gladly switch to a voluntarism based society, but it turns out the vast majority that claims to support voluntarism just wants to take advantage of society without paying for it.
The whole point of society is to be able to support those who can't support themselves. It's not to have a pool of resources from which you can accumulate and hold on to as many resources as you can.
If you are able at all to give up any portion of the fruits of your labor you should be grateful for the conditions set up before you that allowed you to reach such place.
>The whole point of society is to be able to support those who can't support themselves.
And the only way to do that is to threaten those that can support themselves with imprisonment and death if they don't support the weak? There's no other way where people might voluntarily help those people? You don't see the hyprocisy?
>It's not to have a pool of resources from which you can accumulate and hold on to as many resources as you can.
And violence is the only solution.
>If you are able at all to give up any portion of the fruits of your labor you should be grateful for the conditions set up before you that allowed you to reach such place.
Because my parents and grandparents where coerced, I should be grateful and repay them with more coercion?
I said nothing of the sort, you're arguing against something I didn't posit. And nothing of what you said really justifies the selfishness you extolled on your previous comment.
I don't know what to tell you, but according to that standard the only solution to avoiding your kind of coercion is to kill yourself or end the universe.
1. Your parents gave birth to you, so they are the source of you feeling that something is just or unjust. Go complain to them that they brought you into this universe.
2. Take away the guns of the government. End result: other people still have guns. Organized violence by the government turns into non organized violence and you don't even get to vote. What if this results in more coercion?
3. Take away the guns of everyone. Guns aren't the only thing that can kill you. You are embedded in the laws of nature and are mortal. Therefore, the origin of that mortality must be erased, either by ending the laws of physics or by going to an afterlife.
Oh, by the way, if you eat meat or animal products, then you are worse than the thing you complain about, because we are literally stealing the fruits of their labor, including their body.
1. I should complain to my parents that you gathered a gang of thugs and sent them to rob me? That doesn't make sense.
2. How about take away the government?
3. Why are you obsessed with guns? Is it because I used the word gun? Feel free to replace the word 'gun' with rocks, sharpened sticks, nuclear weapons, fists, etc.
I get what you're saying "by the way". The weak should be subjugated at the feet of the strong. In your scenario human beings are the "meat and animals" and the government are the epitome of the evolvoled being.
If I don't support the potential outcome, how could I justify participating?
Here's a scenario for you:
11 people in a room. They decide to take a majority vote to murder one of the 11 at random. What's your vote? No? What happens in the case you're outvoted? You are now complicit in murder. Vote yes? You are now complicit in murder. Casting your vote is your acknowledgement that the you accept the results. The only moral action is to object, conscientiously and refuse to participate.
Now stand in a room of 300,000,000 people where the end result of your participation is endless evil and murder. Congratulations.
> If the majority of people in your country agrees that wealth redistribution is bad, then just elect a government that will stop doing it.
That is why they (the upper class) came up with progressive taxes - so middle class (the minority) would subsidize lower classes (the majority). Basically you suggest a pack of wolves and a ship to democratically decide who will be eaten for dinner.
The fruits of your labor have already been facilitated a lot by the labor of others - you have received education, lived in an urban area with modern infrastructure and availed various public facilities from water to transportation at the cost of other people's efforts. Were you immoral then?
You're not addressing my point at all. You're just rambling trying to justify your position.
No one ever simply admits to being in favor violence and murder towards their fellow man. Just admit it instead of diverting and attempting an attack on the person presenting the position.
You love that the State sticks guns into peoples faces and forces them to fund the endeavors you support. Can you even do that?
I see this sentiment expressed often, but I don't quite get it.
Is the implication that if you personally enjoy a high standard of living through capitalism, it is therefore hypocritical to advocate for everyone to enjoy a high standard of living through socialism? How come?
(I am asking this question in good faith. Note that at no point I am stating that socialism would or could actually achieve a high standard of living for everyone. I am neither interested in having that discussion or claiming that position. Please don't reply with a Wikipedia copy-paste about the great famine)
I appreciate and will honestly try express my point of view on this issue in good faith and without being too snarky.
> I am neither interested in having that discussion or claiming that position. Please don't reply with a Wikipedia copy-paste about the great famine
Actually I come from a Ukrainian family that was affected by Holodomor, so I don't need Wikipedia to reason about the subject but okay, let's drop it.
> Is the implication that if you personally enjoy a high standard of living through capitalism, it is therefore hypocritical to advocate for everyone to enjoy a high standard of living through socialism? How come?
I think champagne socialist brigade on HN is a wealthy people who already got theirs (house in SV that they bought long time ago and which appreciated to several million dollars price today, maxed Roth IRA for decade+ that they weren't even supposed to be eligible to but still got via shenanigans of their corporate employers, etc.), now they just pulling up the ladder and basically suggesting newcomers to consider paying their healthcare cost during their retirement or something (don't know why but those people always enamored with European-style single payer healthcare for no good reason). Now, try to suggest to those people to fund their leftist inclinations by heavily taxing actual wealth and inheritance and they quickly come up with all kinds of convoluted answers why that is a bad approach that would never work...
I appreciate your answer. It's hard to have these conversations online without it quickly devolving into a shouting match, hence my disclaimer.
Not that I have any intent to defend this abstract group of people, but I don't generally get the impression that wealthy people who advocate for a greater social security net do so without understanding that it would necessarily be funded by their taxes. If they do, though, it's certainly a nonsensical and unrealisable position.
That said, I don't get how this eleven-dimensional chess play to have the peasants pay for their healthcare costs during their retirement would be worth the effort. If that's their end goal, wouldn't it be much easier to advocate for less public services and less taxation on the rich, pocket the difference into their investment plans, and use _that_ to fund their private healthcare plans?
> Not that I have any intent to defend this abstract group of people, but I don't generally get the impression that wealthy people who advocate for a greater social security net do so without understanding that it would necessarily be funded by their taxes. If they do, though, it's certainly a nonsensical and unrealisable position.
Why would it be nonsensical? There is no wealth tax in US, their property taxes are capped by prop 13, their Roth withdrawal and re-balancing are tax free. Worst case scenario they will pay some long term capital gains tax, which is still somehow much lower than income tax. So what is left? VAT? Try suggesting increasing VAT and those people will lecture you for an hour how it would be "sO ReGreSsiVe!!1".
> That said, I don't get how this eleven-dimensional chess play to have the peasants pay for their healthcare costs during their retirement would be worth the effort.
I don't see how this is some eleven-dimensional plot. They leeched every single dollar they could while everything around them was slowly crumbling and turning into basically a big homeless camp, now they would like someone else to pay from the _income_ for tidying the place up while their _wealth_ is safely tucked away.
> If that's their end goal, wouldn't it be much easier to advocate for less public services and less taxation on the rich, pocket the difference into their investment plans, and use _that_ to fund their private healthcare plans?
Now that would indeed be a "nonsensical and unrealisable position" in California.
To be clear, I meant "nonsensical and unrealisable" in that there's no realistic, long-term sustainable way to greater public services without greater taxation. Nonsensical as public policy for them to advocate for. I didn't mean that it wouldn't make sense for their pockets to want that, all else equal.
Again, thank you for explaining your thoughts on it.
There are lots of empty houses in the remote countryside in Finland (and I presume the same is true for parts of Sweden and Norway). You can probably rent something for next to nothing, or even make a deal with the owner to stay for free in exchange for keeping the place up. Many of these houses are owned by inheritors living in cities, so finding the owner is a bit of work but solvable through public registries.
One problem is that you’d be living somewhere remote, so you should enjoy solitude and winter darkness, and you need to budget for a car and fuel out of that 500 € or have a really solid plan for self-subsistence so you don’t need to make trips to town.