Princes and Paupers Live the Good Life Together in Sweden

A recent West German immigrant, exhausted from studying Swedish at state expense, begged mercy from welfare authorities. They sent him for a week’s rest on the Spanish Riviera.

This comfortable nation of Volvo drivers has devised the world’s most exhaustive and imaginative welfare system, combining energetic free enterprise with socialist ideals.

They don’t just hire the handicapped in Sweden. In addition, the state buys them up to $180,000 a year in cab fares, maids, housing and special care.

Almost anyone can find a job and, by working the angles, stay home with pay most of the year. Maternity leave, shared by both parents, is soon to be doubled, from nine months to 18.

Child Support, Pensions

With subsidized day care and government child support, Swedish mothers can pursue careers. Pensioners get up to 90% of their best average wage over 15 years.

A doctor’s visit is $8--for a hangnail or brain surgery. School is free up to a Ph.D. There are no slums, and Stockholm’s three bag ladies are local figures.

Swedes spend savings on car phones, which they invented, and holidays. In a nation of 8.5 million people, there are 500,000 pleasure boats cruising in crystal waters under blood-red sunsets.

And many people grumble constantly about it all.

“I’ve got to admit we have it pretty good compared to everyone else,” said Frank Murray, a world-traveling Swedish entrepreneur. “But the system stinks. It is an elephant with clay feet.”

One catch is taxes. People are free to chase the almighty kronor, so long as they don’t keep it. A Stockholm couple earning $90,000 a year could pay as much as $70,000 to the state, counting income tax and indirect taxes.

Factory workers pay about half of their income in various taxes. Employers shell out an extra 40% on top of wages for social charges. Even alimony is paid via the state, so nobody cheats.

Worse, critics say, is the system’s effect on people. “It brings learned helplessness,” said Birgitta Swedenbourg, a leading economist, who warns of hidden monetary and spiritual costs. “It is dehumanizing.”

Steelmaker Lars-Olof Pehrsson detailed how “the society” resolved life’s little worries: employment, housing, education, health care, retirement. Then he grimaced: “Aren’t we boring?”

“Creativity is not an honorable word for the government,” he said. “They make a religion out of preserving the system. . . . We need people who can go a little bananas.”

The system is vastly complex, but its principle is simple: Everyone gets the same deal, rich or poor. That way, no stigma is attached, equality is maintained, people share a community spirit.

Even those who vote for the ruling Social Democratic Party often spurn the label of socialist and hate it when uninformed foreigners call them communists.

Flexible Corporate Taxes

Industry is 90% privately owned, and Swedes thrive in small business. As a former finance minister put it, the state does not want to own the cow, just the milk.

Corporate taxes are flexible, allowing industries to expand, invest in new equipment and offer fringe benefits to spur along successful executives.

But two-thirds of all expenditures in Sweden are made by the state, mostly for benefits and attendant bureaucracy. In most categories, the per-capita spending level is more than double that of the United States.

Proponents call it a safety net for all Swedes and 800,000 foreign residents. Critics, however, say that the net works the other way: It ensnares initiative and flair.

Social programming leaves hardly any spice beyond the dill used to marinate Sweden’s superlative salmon. Even the cats feel it: They are not spayed but given birth control pills instead.

For safety, car headlights burn in daylight, giving traffic the air of a funeral cortege.

Art lacks passion or, like Ingmar Bergman’s films, muses introspectively on the human condition. Even subway graffiti is derivative, a tepid version of New York modern.

Beyond the Hard Rock Cafe, the Opera and a few other places, Stockholm is dead at night. Prices don’t help. Bar drinks start above $7. A middling dinner for two can cost $150.

Fine Products

“This is a fool’s paradise,” Pehrsson said, arguing that a blind desire for security wastes money, stifles initiative and limits Sweden’s horizons.

“We make some of the finest products, but what do we do with them?” he said. “Can you imagine Hasselblad with some Japanese marketing? It should be most popular camera in the world.”

He said that a Lutheran work ethic explains why the welfare state is so prosperous but adds: “Two-thirds of the people work their tails off. The rest squeeze every last drop from the can.”

In Parliament, dissent comes from Gullen Lindblad of the Conservative Party, known as the Moderates in temperate Sweden. The Moderates support welfare, but with lower taxes and less waste.

No Control Over Lives

“People don’t take home enough to control their own lives,” Lindblad said. “It is cuckoo, crazy. Parents must be able to raise their children without asking for help.”

If 92% of Swedish mothers work, she said, it’s because many have no choice. “I don’t think we are better off than a lot of countries,” she said. “We could do many things better.”

Along with other critics, the Moderates want some social services privatized for better efficiency at a lower cost. They say that far too much is lost in taking money from one pocket to be put back in the other.

Critics say that smoother-running private services would free workers for more productive jobs. Sweden’s unemployment rate, about 1.4% of the work force, is among the world’s lowest.

System Breeds Cheating

Most Swedes say the system breeds cheating on taxes and dealing on the black economy. “We resort to barter, like in Africa,” said the wife of a butcher who pays her hairdresser with lamb chops.

But the Social Democrats, reelected in 1985, say such criticisms attack Swedish traditions that go back centuries.

Only 100 years ago, they say, starving Swedes had to emigrate to Minnesota. The nation since grew wealthy together and should share the bounty.

“You might say high taxes, but I would talk about solidarity, the level of our ability to cooperate and support each other,” said Bengt Lindqvist, deputy minister for welfare. “The majority might do better on their own, but what about those of us in unusual situations? A couple might plan carefully and then have a deformed child.”

Equality and efficiency are Sweden’s watchwords.

Company presidents and winos in pressed trousers receive $70 a month for each child they support. Any parent can stay home with a sick child for up to 30 days a year.

Everyone has a “person number” and computerized files. Workers call in sick to an answering machine. Shopping malls have branch offices for welfare services--and tax collection.

Support for System

A sampling of Swedes found no desire to abandon the system which, despite its failings, offers them a more comfortable life than they might find anywhere else.

By most measures, calculating disposable income against public services, Swedes have a higher standard of living than most Americans.

“I don’t think the taxes here are that much worse than anywhere else in Europe,” said a Stockholm shopkeeper who identified himself only as Lars. “At least we get something for our money.”

But there was widespread, often bitter, criticism of the way the system worked.

Mona Schultz is happy that her daughter’s hernia operation was inexpensive, but not that her place on the 10-month waiting list was moved up only when the girl fainted from pain.

Different Doctors

“You see a different doctor each time you are sick,” she said, “and sometimes they are too busy even to look up and see who is in front of them. They seldom have time to study your medical history.”

Schultz is also outraged that she cannot evict a tenant who refuses to pay rent, preventing her from selling her house so she can make ends meet on her teaching job.

Some years back, she had to divorce her disabled husband. They are still a couple but in separate households--to skirt entangling red tape.

Swedes complain that the system distorts their economy.

Too Expensive to Work

For example, Frank Murray’s dentist was suspended for a tape he left on his telephone answering machine. It apologized for his six months’ holiday but said that government rules made it too expensive for him to work.

Housewives pay a washer mechanic $95 to slip a fan belt around two pulleys. Doctors find that it’s cheaper to stay home and paint their houses, whatever the medical backlog, than to work.

Thomas Hammarberg, former secretary general of Amnesty International in London and now head of Swedish Save the Children, sees a cumbersome apparatus that shapes everyone’s lives.

“Here, what is normally called ‘the state’ or ‘authority’ is referred to as ‘the society,’ ” he said. “The idea is solidarity, cooperation. But it amounts to more than that.”

Alcohol Not Accepted

Alcohol use is an example. Liquor is sold only in state stores, and customers can wait more than an hour to pay $15 for a mediocre bottle of wine.

Anders Lonnberg, a specialist in the Social Welfare Ministry, explained massive efforts to educate people against alcohol abuse.

“Alcoholism is no worse than elsewhere, but we don’t accept it,” he said. “To lose a fellow citizen to a total alcohol flip-out is not acceptable to us.”

Lonnberg said that education, enforcement and rehabilitation had sharply turned around Sweden’s drug problem. Eight years ago, there were 800 heroin addicts under age 21. Now, he said, there are none.

Burglaries and Addicts

Such statistics are closely followed.

“We know, for example, that all the burglaries in Sweden are committed by the same 1,000 people, mostly to pay for drugs,” Lonnberg said.

Sweden launched immediately into AIDS research and also underwrote the dispatch of condoms to teen-agers.

“We have things under control,” Lonnberg said, adding with a slight chuckle, “Sometimes too much control.”

Shock Over Assassination

A chill penetrated the orderly state on Feb. 28, 1986, when a mysterious assassin shot Prime Minister Olof Palme. For the first time ever, Swedes locked their doors and worried about security.

The government has twice increased its reward tenfold, now offering $8.2 million for help in finding the murderer.

Some regard the paralyzed investigation simply as a sign that Sweden is no police state. A life term is 12 years, for “cruel murder” and drug trafficking, but most prisoners are paroled.

Recently an imprisoned spy escaped when authorities let him visit his wife overnight and neglected to guard the door.

Easy on Toughs

Guards protect the Social Welfare Ministry, but the minister takes the bus home alone at night. Sometimes young toughs smash up downtown Stockholm for sport, but they are treated indulgently.

Authorities worry that some racism may darken the picture as full employment leads to more immigration. Sweden took in 20,000 foreigners last year, and the rate increases by 400 each month.

Immigrants are paid to learn Swedish but are urged to preserve their identities. In some districts, schools teach 100 languages. Where Asians and Africans congregate, there is some tension.

Some flashier Swedes--tennis stars, race car drivers and assorted moguls--live in London or Monte Carlo with their money. A lot take assignments abroad for a change of pace.

Clean Air, Beauty

But Swedes tend to love their country, the size of California with no more people than in greater Los Angeles.

The air is up to 50 times cleaner than in the United States, and it can be beautiful, with fall sunsets and summer evenings that stay light until midnight.

In winter, they ski and skate and fish on the ice. At the earliest thaw, they explore countless islands, inlets and backwaters.

The hallowed “everyman’s right” means that anyone can hike, camp or collect berries and mushrooms anywhere in Sweden, whoever owns the property.

And the system seems to be in little danger. In fact, “the society” is about to be extended to cover barnyard animals.

Astrid Lindgren, now 80, a wildly popular author of children’s books, has championed a bill requiring farmers to let their cows out to summer pasture, uncage their chickens and expand their pigsties.