Where there's a Will there's a Stancil

 

Sometime in the late 1980s, when I was working as a "lifestyle journalist",  I was sent on a junket to Denmark, where we toured factories for luxury products that advertised wth the magazine I was working for: Georg Jensen for silver, Royal Copenhagen for porcelain, Carlsberg for beer. I was enchanted by the discipline and seriousness of them all, especially by one glass-blowing plant, I think it was Swedish Orrefors, that looked like ballet. This image, from Holmegaards Glaswærk, 1954, via Wikipedia.

People have this fantasy version of redistribution in their heads where their own lives would get cheaper and easier, but that's often (usually?) because they have falsely imagined themselves at the bottom of the redistribution ladder. Many people would just be net givers.

— Will Stancil (@whstancil.bsky.social) September 3, 2026 at 10:09 AM

People SAY this, but the main complaint you hear from people is "I can't afford anything," and wide-scale redistribution would result in a huge number of those people HAVING LESS MONEY. They'd be able to afford less! On net, they'd be worse off, that's what redistribution is.

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— Will Stancil (@whstancil.bsky.social) September 3, 2026 at 10:08 AM

Not sure where Will is getting his numbers here. DSA-type proposals aren't generally aimed at dispossessing "huge numbers", but billionaires, or owners of $5-million Manhattan condos that they don't live in, like the new New York City law. Elizabeth Warren's plan to lift the cap on payroll taxes to save Social Security affects only those who earn over $184,500, maybe 6% of American workers. And the vile Ohio senator Bernie Moreno is her cosponsor on that. DSA itself has taken to outdoing Marx by defining "working class" as everybody who lives on paychecks rather than stocks and bonds (I think they don't mean to include old folks and the disabled whose checks come from Social Security and various other kinds of pension trust funds paid for over the years in nickels and dimes, as opposed to the real rentiers enjoying the fruits of having been capitalists all their lives), suggesting that the number of people they plan to redistribute income from after the revolution is really way smaller than the number of people they mean to redistribute it to. 

 Will may well think it will take a lot more money from people at lower income levels to achieve some important goal, and he may well be right, but he's not giving us enough information to argue with. How many people are going to be suffering from HAVING LESS MONEY and, putting it coarsely, how many votes?

The point that struck me as worth arguing with was the one that starts with the Danish taxpayer, because I've read something about that, and it's clear that Danes, paying some of the highest tax rates in the industrialized world, really don't generally complain about the tax burden of supporting the undeserving poor. To the contrary, if you ask them, they consistently express pride, as if they thought paying their taxes was a good thing.

One reason for that might be that they don't have a lot of undeserving poor in Denmark (0.2% to 0.6% living in extreme poverty, as compared to 5% in the US, or around 17 million souls), and virtually everybody who needs a job has a job, with 2.7% unemployment, where the US is congratulating itself because our unemployment rate has been at 4.1% for two months in a row, while the stock market is panicky at the same time because the good news about the labor force means the Federal Reserve Bank Open Markets Committee will probably move to raise the Federal Funds interest rate in a couple of weeks, for fear that the economy is overheating and that will aggravate inflation. Danish inflation in July was at 1.7%, down from 1.89% in June, by the way, I'm not perfectly clear why, but apparently it happens in a number of countries in the Eurozone because it doesn't happen in the other ones with the same currency, just as there are different rates in the Dollar Zone of the USA, only they don't get publicized, like the different poverty rates; and the Danish case seems to involve tax policy, and the way they calculate inflation (which differs from country to country, unlike US states). It nevertheless does indicate the generosity of the Danish government doesn't stop them from having a pretty good handle on consumer prices.

At the same time I'm pleased to report that Danes get grumpy just like Americans over price rises that don't reflect inflation, as in this Reddit commentary from 2025 on the Danish perception that it's much worse than the official figures suggest:

Economics professor and former economic advisor Michael Svarer calls the development "remarkable."

He assesses that the mismatch between the Danes' expectations and the actual reality may be due to the fact that we generalize our economy based on the price of individual goods. For example, the price of coffee, which has increased by 32.1% in one year, or the price of beef, which has increased by 20.9%.

"My best guess is that consumers see some prices on goods that are part of your daily shopping basket - for example, beef - which increase a lot, and then you generalize from that."

The other thing about virtually everybody having a job is that virtually everybody pays something toward the maintenance of the welfare state. Unlike the US, where low incomes have been so low that Congress has decided that 30% to 40% of the workforce shouldn't pay any income tax at all (though they still have to pay the payroll tax for Social Security and Medicare—as I keep trying to tell you those are socialist insurance premiums), Denmark assures every laborer a living wage—not through a minimum wage law (not that there's anything intrinsically wrong with that) but though negotiations between government and labor unions, in a country where union membership is close to 80%. 

Everybody in Denmark makes a contribution "according to his means" in the Marxian formulation because everybody can (8% "labor market contribution" plus a bottom rate of 12% on income after deductions), and I think that's how it works, as one USNews story put it:

The reason behind the high level of support for the welfare state in Denmark is the awareness of the fact that the welfare model turns our collective wealth into well-being. We are not paying taxes. We are investing in our society. We are purchasing quality of life.

Danish taxpayers overwhelmingly express pride in their high tax burden (popular at nearly 90% levels) because they don't regard it as some individuals paying for other individuals but the entire society collectively making social infrastructure from which all benefit. I don't see any point in arguing over whether this constitutes "social democracy" or "democratic socialism" or some other -ism. I do like to say that it is a "socialization" of problems within a particular community, in issues that aren't exactly exotic like the support of the elderly or the education of children or what have you, on a community basis.