Acropolis Now

[Louis VI the Fat]

They're not middle class. They're merely well off unemployed people.

I was a bit sarcastic. I meant handouts to the poor not as unemployment benefits, but in affordable housing, decent education for all, accessible healthcare. In the Nordic countries, people who receive more in benefits than they pay in taxes even have the right to vote!! Nor is one's economic status equated with one's moral status.

All of that empowers the working class, allows an economy to draw and develop talent from all social strata, creates social mobility.


The Hobbesian anglo jungles do not, as is so often argued by its proponents, stimulate the poor to get of their lazy behinds. They rather keep the poor in their place. Neo-liberal paradises have the lowest social mobility in the Western world.

~~o~~o~~<<oOo>>~~o~~o~~

It's all not a matter of rightwing - leftwing.

The Nordic countries are made of glass, they're so transparent. It is a miracle to behold. Everything is open, direct, accessible.

People are employed, judged, on their individual merit, instead of through personal relations. Economic exchange is done without the tedium of close connection to social exchange. No need to have six elaborate lunches before a deal is struck - these are decided upon within twenty minutes of the first contact. The merits of the deal are glossed over, not the person at the table. There is little corruption. Societies are egalitarian - people recognise themselves in each other.
Greece, within Europe, is in all of these aspects at the other end of the scale. It is all not a matter of left or right, nor even of economics. It is cultural.