Outside the closet a false idea

The exterior is a false idea. 99% of all people work most of their lives but they are sick and unemployed sometimes. Then it applies to not having to leave house and home as soon as you become unemployed or ill. Do you really only want to have a good financial existence only when you are useful to the employer? What, then, has one made oneself other than a slave?

Some are ill most of their lives. The high earners and everyone else who is healthy should be grateful for their health and not complain about the tax. A generous social security fund does not have to conflict with full employment. Until the bourgeois government in the 90s in Sweden, we had almost full employment and a generous social security fund.

Reduced contributions and social security is just to lower wages for low and middle income earners. They must make people so desperate that they accept bad conditions in new jobs and deterioration in their current ones for fear of exclusion. This is confirmed by internal documents from the Moderates. That is the idea behind the Alliance's line of work.

Calling it “outage” when someone is sick or unemployed for a period of time is not just mean – it’s wrong. It’s the very normality of life.

---

Even the rich go broke

Illness and mental illness follow class lines, but they do not stop at the working class. Figures from the Swedish Social Insurance Agency show that high-income earners also claim sickness benefits – among employed women with high incomes, just over 9 percent did so in 2021, compared to just over 21 percent in lower income groups.(public.se)

New reports on stress and burnout show that pressure is increasing throughout working life, not least in academic professions and managerial jobs.(Today's PS) It's not just the "weak" who go into the wall, but people with high salaries, high loans and high demands.

The idea that "sick and unemployed people can just take an easier job" often sounds reasonable - until it's you or your partner who is left with broken health and having to endure a grueling low-wage job with constant worry about the rent.

---

The middle class and the homeless have the same basic interest: a safe home

This is where the middle-class family in a condominium, the tenant in the million-dollar program, and the person sleeping in a shelter meet: everyone needs an unconditional right to housing. The UN's special rapporteurs on housing state that the right to "adequate housing" is a human right - not a luxury product.(Human Rights)

If that right applies to everyone, the fear or risk of falling straight into poverty is reduced. homelessness due to illness or unemployment. It benefits the indebted middle class as much as those who are already outside. Secure housing is a class alliance issue.

---

Unemployment is politics, not a force of nature

During the post-war period, Sweden chose a model with pronounced full employment: a strong public sector, active labor market policies and a solidarity-based wage policy. This meant that unemployment was low by international standards until the 1980s.(library.fes.de)

In the 1990s, politics shifted. The financial crisis, EU adaptation and a bourgeois government made the “labor line” a slogan – but it was as much about pushing down wages and conditions as it was about creating jobs. Expressen revealed in 2009 how Finance Minister Anders Borg explicitly wanted to lower the “reservation wages”, i.e. the lowest wage people are prepared to accept:
https://www.expressen.se/nyheter/lagre-reservationsloner-ar-alliansens-mal/

Union analyses and investigations show the same logic: unemployment insurance and social insurance are cut to make people afraid enough to take worse jobs for lower pay.(IF Metal)

This means that the level of unemployment does not just “stay the same”. It is set by political decisions about public investment, the public sector, unemployment insurance, education and industrial policy. Unemployment is largely a political construct. Either you build it away with jobs in welfare, infrastructure and green industry – or you let people be unemployed and use insecurity as a whip.

---

Low-wage jobs make the whole country weaker

The research is quite clear: poor job quality, precarious conditions and low wages impair both health and productivity. The OECD and WHO highlight that low wages, precarious employment and a poor work environment increase the risk of mental ill health, while at the same time reducing productivity.(OECD)

At the same time, both Swedish and international experience shows that good wages and secure jobs drive modernization: companies are forced to invest in technology, skills and organization. instead of living on cheap labor. That was the very essence of the Rehn–Meidner model and the solidarity wage policy.

Erik S. Reinert has shown historically how rich countries built their wealth base precisely by moving from low-wage, low-productivity jobs to knowledge-intensive industry, with the help of state industrial policy and protection against destructive low-wage competition.(NORLA)

In short: if some jobs are great and others are really bad, you won't have stable societies and it will be difficult to create job matching across the entire labor market. Instead, you will get stress, ill health, and political anger.

---

"Make the poorest too angry - and the country will become ungovernable"

Machiavelli already pointed out that a ruler makes his country unstable if the poorest are too poor – then they have more to gain from rebellion than from peace. This is essentially the same thing modern research on austerity shows: when governments cut welfare and social security, support for extreme parties grows, both on the right and the left.(Sveriges Riksbank)

We see it now in Europe: austerity and insecurity have opened the door to fascist and ultra-nationalist movements.

---

The deindustrialization of the West was also a political project

Reinert and other development economists describe how Europe's wealth from the 1300th century onwards was built on strong states that protected and directed industry for the common good – not on laissez-faire.(NORLA) Researcher Alice Amsden shows how post-war Asian republics grew through state-controlled credit, support for strategic industries. Many countries had low wages in the global south, but it was state regulation and financing of their industry that distinguished the countries that emerged from their poverty and not which had the lowest wages. In China, wages and working conditions have improved over time.

When the West responded to the oil crises in the 1970s and 80s with neoliberalism – monetarism à la Milton Friedman, deregulation, privatization, free capital movement – ​​the focus shifted from industrial development to financial sector profits and “freedom of the market”.(OUP Academic) The result was deindustrialization, precarious jobs, low-wage sectors and widening gaps.(Paulo Gala / Economia & Finances)

The idea was that Western capital would profit from cheap labor in China and other “low-wage countries.” But the price was that we lost industrial capacity, while China built up its own. Today, it threatens both the West’s economic position and democratic stability.

---

We have an alternative: use currency to protect people – not profits

Modern monetary theory (MMT) describes how a state that has its own currency cannot "run out of money" in the same way as a household – the real limitation is inflation and real resources, not a pretend government “piggy bank”.(Wikipedia)

That means:

• The state can finance full employment, secure unemployment insurance without out-of-pocket insurance, and health insurance that is never used as a starvation tool.
• To avoid inflation, investments should be directed towards real capacity: healthcare, schools, social care, green industry, housing, research.
• Taxes on high incomes, wealth and environmental pollution can be used to cool overheated sectors and even out inequalities – while tax on low wages can be kept low or zero.

It is fully compatible with scientific macroeconomics as long as one takes inflation risks and real resources seriously.

---

Why this destructive path?

After the oil crises, a narrative was sold: the problem was the public sector, unions, “laziness” and too much security – the solution was the market, austerity and “greed is good”. Ayn Rand was hailed as the philosopher who made selfishness a virtue,(The Guardian) and Milton Friedman's monetarism was highlighted as the scientific answer to all crises.(Wikipedia)

Today we know that many of these ideas did not deliver stable growth or safer societies. Instead, they delivered something else: a class system where a small elite gets cheap, fearful servants – people who keep quiet at work for fear of losing their housing, sick pay or unemployment benefits.

The question is whether that is really a reasonable price.

---

Man became strong by taking care of the weak.

Archaeology and anthropology point in a completely different direction than Rand and Friedman. David Graeber and David Wengrow show in “The Dawn of Everything” how human societies throughout history have often been more flexible, supportive, and experimental than the rigidly hierarchical myth we are usually taught.(Academy)

Findings of people with severe disabilities who lived for a long time indicate that the group carried them, fed them and protected them. Humans are a fairly weak animal physically. Our superpower has been the ability to cooperate, share and take care of each other – not to let the weakest perish.

When we build systems that deliberately make the sick, unemployed, and homeless insecure in order to scare the rest, we are sawing off the branch that has made our species successful.

---

So what do we really want?

A society where you are only good as long as you run fast enough for someone else's profit – and where both the middle class and workers live with constant housing and income anxiety?

Or a society where everyone, regardless of class and functional variation, has the right to housing, healthcare and income security – where we use our common currency, our industrial knowledge and our solidarity to create abundance and peace instead of fear and cheap labor?

For me the answer is pretty clear.