Sergei Grits/AP Photo
People cross the city street in Helsinki, Finland, April 3, 2023.
I recently took a reporting trip to Finland (Want to see that reporting? Keep reading the Prospect!), where I rented a car. Driving to my hotel, I was shocked at the incredibly civilized road manners on Finnish highways, thanks in large part to the omnipresent speed cameras and tickets that are assessed as a percentage of one’s income—121,000 euros, in one recent case.
To Americans, this might seem like a typical example of nanny-state overreach. For many drivers here, freedom is when you get to drive your giant, powerful, heavy car with total disregard for the law and the safety of other drivers—as I saw on the drive to Newark Airport to catch my flight, during which I was nearly run off the road by a bunch of hooligans swerving through traffic at a hundred miles an hour.
But in reality, the Finland experience reflects a deeper and more mature idea of freedom than the childish selfishness that passes for it in the U.S.
Strict traffic rules are a burden, in the sense that one must obey or pay a hefty price. But they also enable a much freer driving experience. With lower speeds in the city, merging, navigating, and other normal driving activities are much more straightforward. Those slow speeds, plus other traffic controls, also make life much safer for pedestrians and cyclists, adding up to a traffic death rate more than two-thirds lower than that of the U.S. Yet the basic point of driving—to get to where you are going—is easier and safer in Finland than in America. You can still take your car just about anywhere, you just can’t do so in a way that infringes on the transportation rights of others.
This conception of freedom can be seen throughout Nordic society. One of the core objectives of the Nordic social democratic welfare state, for instance, is to spread income out over the working life. The average person hits their peak earning years when they are in their forties and fifties, thanks to accumulated raises, greater experience, and so on. But people also need income outside those years—when they are children, or retired and not working at all, or when they are in their twenties and thirties and taking on the extreme expenses of starting a family.
So if you are, say, a 50-year-old Finnish accountant making good money, you are taxed quite heavily to fund benefits for young families and pensioners. But when those parents are in their prime earning years and you’ve retired, they pay for your pension, as well as the families coming up behind them. In this sense, there are powerful and self-interested reasons to support the welfare state—it shifts income from when you need it least to when you need it most, expanding your freedom to start a family when it makes the most biological sense and to retire in relative comfort.
The deep-down truth is that all modern societies are highly complex and interdependent, and therefore every person depends on others in innumerable ways.
To be fair, thanks to the New Deal, America does have a decent old-age pension in the form of Social Security (though it could still use a minimum benefit). But the idea of imposing even modest taxes to provide income security for families provokes snarling outrage among Republicans and even some Democrats. Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) reportedly killed President Biden’s expansion of the Child Tax Credit—a big step forward but still meager and poorly designed by Nordic standards—because he thought poor recipients would spend the money on drugs.
Thanks to Manchin, child poverty skyrocketed last year from the lowest level ever recorded. This attitude is also one reason why America is the only rich country with no paid family leave system, and no universal child care or pre-kindergarten, which leads families to spend thousands of dollars out of pocket. The terrific expense of child-raising is one of the most common reasons pregnant women say they’ve gotten an abortion, and why many adults have fewer kids than they would have liked. True reproductive freedom isn’t just about contraception—it’s about the ability to choose to have whatever size of family that one wants. Nordic folks enjoy this freedom far more than Americans.
A similar situation holds with respect to health care. During Bernie Sanders’s campaigns for president, the most common attack on his Medicare for All plan was that “most people who have employer-based coverage like it and don’t want to change.” Setting aside the fact that the status quo system does not actually allow people to keep their current coverage—people are kicked off or forced to switch their insurance coverage by the tens of millions every year—it is surely true that many Americans would be enraged at the prospect of a higher tax bill in return for guaranteed, cradle-to-grave coverage. Thanks in part to this mindless, self-defeating selfishness, we have a dilapidated, hyper-complex health care system that routinely leaves people without vital care or saddles them with six-figure bills, and also costs more money than anywhere else in the world by a huge margin.
That isn’t the case in the Nordics. While those countries’ health care systems vary somewhat, everyone has a firm guarantee of basic, essential coverage. People don’t worry about losing their insurance if they get fired, or switch jobs, or start their own business. The rational, self-interested, freedom-expanding choice is for everyone to be automatically enrolled in a high-quality, national health care program—precisely the choice that is forbidden here in America.
The deep-down truth is that all modern societies are highly complex and interdependent, and therefore every person depends on others in innumerable ways. The way to actually maximize freedom for the greatest number of people is to face that fact squarely, and arrange institutions so that people have the resources necessary to make meaningful choices when possible. American “freedom” is instead about pandering to the entitled, wealthy minority who want to indulge their every whim, no matter the consequences to others or themselves.
As a closing comment, let me return to driving. Leaving Helsinki, I had an extremely early flight, and so had to drive back to return my rental car at 3:00 in the morning. I was once again shocked to learn that late at night in Finland, they turn off most of the traffic lights. So much for the Finnish nanny state! But when I thought about it, it made sense. Those controls are necessary during rush hour because there are lots of cars on the road, but not so much with only a few—assuming that drivers can be trusted.
During pandemic lockdowns when the streets were deserted, by contrast, American road deaths actually increased thanks to rampant lawless speeding, whereas they went down by about 15 percent across most of the Europe. One can only imagine the even worse carnage that would happen if some American city tried turning off traffic lights at night. I’d guess maybe five or ten minutes would pass before the first bloody pileup from two packs of illegal street racers T-boning each other at 150 miles an hour.
But that’s American freedom for you—the freedom to be turned into paste by a gleefully antisocial jerk.
