It also helps that the Nordic societies aren't quite as thoroughly consumerized as the US. The advertising is less in-your-face, consumption is regarded as less virtuous, there's less drive to purchase useless junk that only exists to make profit. There's a neologism in Finnish, "turhake", a useless product; the word is a play on "hyödyke", meaning a good (literally: "a thing with utility")
This is a bit of a romantic way of viewing the situation.
This non-consumerization of Scandinavia is not optional or voluntary at the individual level. It is imposed forcibly by the government on everyone, whether a particular individual actually wants to be more consumerized or not. Conformity to the top-down bureaucracy's state declaration of what constitutes "virtue" is mandatory.
For example, outsiders often believe that shops close so early in Scandinavia because the locals just love spending time with their families rather than engaging in evil capitalist pursuit of still more money. Some indeed do; other shop owners would rather stay open late or open on Sundays, but they have no choice. They are legally required to close then, and will be heavily fined if they don't.
Another example: extremely high taxes are specifically designed to make "luxury" items (which is just about anything other than basic foodstuffs) punitively expensive. A simple camera charger that costs $5 or 10 in the US costs €70 to 100 in Finland, due to "luxury" taxes.
>Also, store opening times are nowadays unregulated in Finland.
Well, that was a very recent change. But I don't know if that's very representative of Nordics in general, I know that shopping hours have been deregulated in Sweden for a quite long time.
Source: I went to Helsinki and forgot my camera charger. That's what they told me in the shop when I expressed shock that they wanted over €100 for a simple charger.
Majority of the so called "luxury taxes" (that were really named so) existed maybe one or two hundred years ago, mainly targeted then-existing aristocracy, but most of such special taxes are long gone. (Maybe the after-effects are still showing up in weird places, like your clerk's imagination...) One gem was the literal "tax on fun" (which applied to cinema shows and dance halls), but that was discontinued in the 1950s. I guess only "luxury taxes" that we have now are quite "normal" by Western standards, like sales taxes on confectionery and alcohol and cars.
More recently, a couple of generations ago there might have been import tariffs on consumer electronics...?
I can't think any other tax on the product itself than the regular 24% value added tax. (Of course, the indirect ones, like income tax paid by employees, tax on corporate profit, etc probably show in the final price.)
Foodstuffs do have lower VAT rate (around 10%), so maybe the clerk was thinking about that, but that difference doesn't explain a 5€ -> 100€ hike. Maybe you just managed to wander to the most expensive retail store in the downtown and had an unusual camera model...
Finland is expensive place, but most of that caused by more mundane reasons than special "luxury tax", like indirect taxes, regulation, and shipping costs raising the general price levels.
The shops are forced to close to prevent a race to the bottom where everyone has to stay open all the time to stay in business, thereby ruining the free time of small shop owner and causing proliferation of chain stores.
And by almost all tracked indicators, they are happier and healthier.
> Conformity to the top-down bureaucracy's state declaration of what constitutes "virtue" is mandatory.
It's a democracy, isn't it? Therefore the people have chosen to live this way because the majority believes it gives the collective a better life.
The poor sod in the US who has to pay $15,000 to have a baby or put a cast around a broken leg would probably love to have the problem of expensive luxury goods.
> This non-consumerization of Scandinavia is not optional or voluntary at the individual level. It is imposed forcibly by the government on everyone, whether a particular individual actually wants to be more consumerized or not. Conformity to the top-down bureaucracy's state declaration of what constitutes "virtue" is mandatory.
Thank you for explaining to me how my own society and culture works. "Luxury tax"...
Does the government require this arbitrarily, or because that's the will of the people?
Here in the UK, we have Sunday trading laws which limit how long shops can be open on a Sunday. These are reasonably popular (but not unanimously) because they ensure that shop workers have some guaranteed time with their family.
Whether some would prefer to have Friday, or Wednesday off instead of Sunday is irrelevant. The state has decided that having time off on Sundays is the only acceptable way of organizing one's life, and it is imposed by force on everyone uniformly.
A democracy by definition is the will of the majority, the tyranny of the majority -- not the will of all the people in general.
To the extent that a democratic society does not wish to be oppressive, its participants ought to choose to maximize respect for individual rights and personal decisionmaking -- not arrogate to themselves a paternal decisionmaking role that dictates moral virtues from above to everyone, whether they like it or not.
Edit: incidentally, Sunday trading laws were not created to give people time with their families; that's a modern leftist retcon of the motive. Sunday trading laws are a relic of the medieval legal system, where they were created so that everyone could be required to attend church and receive moral instruction and sermonizing from a state-approved minister.
> A democracy by definition is the will of the majority, the tyranny of the majority -- not the will of all the people in general.
No, its not. A democracy, by definition, is exactly what it seems by etymology, rule by the people in general.
Pure majoritarianism is one means of operationalizing the concept of "democracy", but its one that's pretty much been rejected as an undesirable means of doing so for, at least, most of the modern era.
Not so. Even in ancient Athens, with direct democracy, decisions were taken through majority-rules voting. Direct democracy itself has not been a feature of any major democratic instance since then.
Nor has any modern democracy (at least one operating at larger scale than your local food co-op) ever rejected "operationalizing" democracy through majoritarianism. The word "democracy" as it is understood by the vast majority of people today, other than a tiny fringe of leftist intellectuals, empirically refers to "majority-rules representative democracy."
The only people who reject majoritarianism are a tiny number of "theory"-steeped leftist academics with little connection to or knowledge of how things actually work in the real world (but have an outsized notion of their own intellectual qualifications to promulgate decrees on how things ought to work.) Such people can be easily detected through the use of pompous neologisms like "operationalize," which are almost exclusively used by that group of people.
> > Pure majoritarianism is one means of operationalizing the concept of "democracy", but its one that's pretty much been rejected as an undesirable means of doing so for, at least, most of the modern era.
> Even in ancient Athens, with direct democracy, decisions were taken through majority-rules voting.
"Ancient Athens", you will note, significant predates the modern era, and illustrates nothing about what has been rejected in that era.
> Nor has any modern democracy (at least one operating at larger scale than your local food co-op) ever rejected "operationalizing" democracy through majoritarianism.
You dropped the word "pure"; yes, most modern democracies incorporate some majoritarian elements, and yet, they almost universally reject pure majoritarianism where policies are decided by whichever preference gains an infinitesimal degree greater than 50% support in the general public.
Indirect democracy itself its a deviation from pure majoritarianism, and most modern democracies operate largely or entirely as indirect, representative democracies.
Bicameralism in which one house has longer terms or indirectly (or un-) elected members, or staggering elections within a single house, is a further departure from pure majoritarianism within an indirect democracy (and some forms of this are quite common in modern democracies.)
The idea of fundamental limitations on the powers of government that require something more than the normal legislative process (which itself usually resembles majoritarianism, within the legislative body) -- whether it is confirmation by additional bodies, supermajority votes within the same bodies, or multiple votes within the same bodies separated by a specified time interval -- is a further departure from pure majoritarianism (and one frequently adopted by modern democracies.)
Representation models that are not strictly tied to population, such as ones where subunits are given equal representation irrespective of population, are another departure from pure majoritarianism.
Models in which officials at any level are elected by an intermediate body rather than the public at large, (and, a fortiori, those where the body itself is not apportioned strictly proportionally to population) -- such as an "electoral college" -- are further departures from pure majoritarianism.
Every modern democracy (on the national scale, at least) departs from pure majoritarianism through some degree of indirect democracy, and virtually all depart from pure majoritarianism in other ways (most adopt some of the departures previously discussed in this post, some -- e.g., the U.S., adopt all of them.)
> The only people who reject majoritarianism are a tiny number of "theory"-steeped leftist academics
This is radically untrue. Rejection of pure majoritarianism is not only not limited to either leftists or academics (much less the intersection of those groups in "leftist academics"), its probably more common and more strong among theorists of the right than of the left.
