52% of the Norwegian population receives government financial aid; A health care worker in Norway is "not hired as a guard dog but trained to see suffering"

Since Norway became wealthy on oil in the ’60s, it’s prided itself on its commitment to the weak and ill-fated and has been put on a pedestal by every left-leaning candidate everywhere 

writes Hannah Spier in The Spectator regarding The Dark Side of Norway’s Social Democracy (The Alarming Rise of Disability Claims and Entitlement Culture). The Norwegian psychiatrist based in Switzerland, author of the Substack Psychobabble, adds that "Being a fully-fledged Norwegian patriot who celebrates our national day religiously, the deterioration of the social democracy is painful to behold."

Little do they [the ubiquitous left-leaning candidates] know that in 2022, 52 percent of the Norwegian population received government financial aid, with 10.5 percent of the population on disability leave, a number that is estimated to increase by about 2.5 percent each year. The rate in psychiatric disability is rising drastically in the youngest, while pensioners sell their hard-earned houses to afford ever higher taxations on lower-than-promised retirement payouts.

In 2012, there was an uproar in Norwegian news media because of a new phenomenon called “å nave,” which is slang for someone using social welfare. 

 … This year, governmental financial aid for 18- to 29-year-olds is at an all-time high, three times more than that in 1995. Among the Gen Zers on welfare, 63 percent claim to have psychiatric problems. They claim to have exactly the type of symptoms subjectively diagnosed by a health care worker whose natural proclivity is to have sympathy for them — not hired as a guard dog but trained to see suffering.

 … Left-wing politicians tend to liken getting short-term disability aid to driving on the motorway and waiting for a petrol refill on the hard shoulder. The problem is that Norwegians have never learned the responsibility needed to make sure that there is petrol in the car in the first place. Now, the hard shoulder is packed with cars waiting to have their refill — as is evident in the fact that 81 percent of those who receive short-term disability leave go on to receive lifelong disability pay.

Related: Denmark may have free universities and a national health system, but what is its free education and health care actually worth? 

In Scandinavia … the weather is appalling, the taxes are the highest in the world, the cost of living is similarly ridiculous, the languages are impenetrable, the food is (still) awful for the most part … Sweden is supposedly "neutral" (it’s not, and has not been for decades) … since the days when it sold iron ore to Hitler … The Norwegians have … taken their foot off the gas in terms of their work ethic … [And] Denmark has the highest direct and indirect taxes in the world, … the highest energy taxes in the world, car import duty of 180%, and so on … How the money is spent is kept deliberately opaque by the authorities.