Do We Really Want "Freedom," American Style?

Click here for an article in The New York Times' "Opinion Today," by editorial page editor James Bennet.

It's all worth the read, but here's the section I like, on Finland -- and check out the bolded paragraph at the end:

Before our office shut down and we all dispersed, one of the last editorial board meetings we held in person was with the prime minister of Finland, Sanna Marin. At 34, she’s the youngest female prime minister in the world.

She spoke about Finland’s challenges in coping with climate change, immigration and a movement of people to cities that is hollowing out rural communities. Again and again, as she talked about sustaining political consensus to confront these challenges, she returned to the importance of the sense of security Finns feel because of their strong social safety net, including free health care and university.

“It gives people freedom when you have a very strong welfare state,” she told us.

That formulation stands the American politics of freedom on its head. Franklin Roosevelt may have envisioned freedom from want, but in recent decades freedom here has come to mean freedom from taxes, freedom from regulation, freedom from having to wear a mask in public. The American left has largely conceded the rhetoric and even the idea of freedom to the right.

Told that some Americans look at Finland and fear socialism, the prime minister smiled. As neighbors of the Soviet Union, Finns had seen a socialist experiment up close and wanted no part of it. “We are an open-market society,” she said proudly.

Our columnist Nicholas Kristof, in a deeply reported exploration of the Nordic model, had the brilliant idea to look at what it’s like to work for McDonald’s in Denmark. The answer is that, even though Denmark has no minimum wage, you make about $22 an hour and get “six weeks of paid vacation a year, life insurance, a year’s paid maternity leave and a pension plan.” All that plus the Danish guarantees of medical insurance and paid sick leave.