The Swedes are Retiring Early

Back when the apologists of the welfare state wanted more of our money we got to hear a lot about the condition of the working class.

But now that the welfare state has become established and tenured it has become more secretive. We seem to know little about the lives of the poor, and the bureaucrats and the experts like it that way.

Every now and again, someone lifts a flap of the tent and you can look in. That happened this week when the Moderate Party coalition won the elections in Sweden.

When 25-year-old Swede Jessica Pettersson lost her job recently, she found that the welfare state bureaucrats wanted to classify her as mentally disabled. According to Nima Sanadaji,

Pettersson has a high school degree in economics and has worked in a post office and in a grocery store, among other jobs. After being out of work for a while, her supervisor at the unemployment agency told her that she ought to meet with a work-psychologist since "it is so hard to be without a job."

Huh? So she went to a psychologist and pretty soon found that as a result of testing she ought to be “classified as disabled since she wasn't good enough at mathematics.”

No big deal, you understand. It was “simply a matter of changing a code in her status as unemployed.” And she could get more subsidies and benefits.

Today 19.3 percent of those seeking jobs at the unemployment office are being classified as disabled.

What is going on here?

What is going on is that the government wants to hide the true rate of unemployment. In the Economist’s “Pocket World in Figures 2006” the unemployment rate in Sweden is given as 4.9 percent for 2003.

But, writes Johnny Munkhammar, the real rate of unemployment is much higher.

McKinsey estimated the total unemployment rate to be 15 per cent. Sweden has decreased the size of the labour force more than any other European country during the last 15 years, shuffling away hundreds of thousands of people from being called "unemployed" to "early retired".

Early retired? Yes. Get a load of this,

Youth unemployment is 22 per cent, the fifth highest in EU-25, and the number of people under the age of 30 that are "early retired" has increased from 13, 000 to 22,000 during the last six years.

Well, we knew the Swedes were different, but 22,000 early retired under the age of 30? Obviously the new generation of Swedes are not up to the level of the great soprano Birgit Nilsson and her stentorian voice and work ethic. They just can’t take the pace of the modern world.

In Britain, of course, a similar situation exists. The number of people on “incapacity benefit” is three times the number of official unemployed.

But don’t think we are so hot, pal. In the US the number of officially disabled doubles every decade.