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Finland tried to end homelessness. What can we learn from its runaway success – and recent failures?
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2026
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"but in the last three years sweeping cuts to social services, healthcare and benefits by Finland’s rightwing government have seen the country’s success story go into reverse"
Classic
a staple amongst right wing governments always give a less fortunate group to look down upon to distract.
Yup. We can learn that left wing politics are humane and right wing politics can only destroy. So nothing new.
The unfortunate fact is that these left wing policies cost money and despite fairly high tax rates, they had to borrow a ton of it. Now that's being overcorrected for by the right wing and I bet they'll also lower taxes, causing even more debt.
Much of EU is seeing an increase of both its debt to GDP ratio as well as the average age of its citizens, so a few decades from now, many countries will be proper fucked by debt.
Do you not understand what positive ROI is? Borrowing to invest in social services pays off and increases total revenue in the end. Even if you're greedy you should love it!
Only reason to oppose it is if you're a hateful piece of shit
There's one left wing party and the major right wing one is the one taking record high loans. They've had financial control for decades
So, what you are saying is that it is not possible, under capitalism, to provide a solution for the problem that planned economy solves, and that, under capitalism, people will necessarily be tortured by being denied basic necessities like that. If so, I would argue that you are, indeed, correct.
Yes. It is not possible, under capitalism, to provide a solution for the problem that planned economy solves: Running out of working age people.
I'm not exactly sure how a planned economy solves it, but I guess you can explain that to me.
Let me remind you that the problem in question was homelessness. Planned economy solve that problem by making it so that all economic agents (in this case we only care about one - the state) are interested in providing guaranteed housing.
As for running out of working-age people, planned economies have been able to provide favorable conditions to people having children and universal healthcare and guaranteed housing so that people don't die simply because that would make some rich guy even richer.
There are plenty of capitalist nations providing favorable conditions to people having children, most of them in Europe. It doesn't work because people don't have a dozen children if they don't need them as a retirement plan.
The problem behind homelessness in Finland, a nation that actually wants to do something about it, is the same as the problem behind retirement ages rising across Europe, etc. You're talking about a nation that taxes the wealthy quite dearly. But if there aren't enough workers, you have to pay the ones that do exist too much. A planned economy shuffles things around, but it doesn't make these workers appear out of thin air.
No economic system fixes the fact that with every passing year, there are more people whose upkeep needs to be provided by yet fewer people. Not until most necessary jobs can truly be automated away, but the way things are going, nobody wants that anyway.
If you invest upfront, that investment, like not having to handle healthcare for all those homeless, returns dividents.
Evidently not, especially if we don't disregard the fact that those states never provided good living standards for the people they colonised.
Children are becoming much more of an economic burden, and people are being provided fewer and fewer resources to raise them.
If retirement age was the sole barrier to providing guaranteed housing under capitalism, we would have witnessed capitalist guaranteed housing before. We didn't.
And yet, it still maintains a class of people whose existence is based on making the rest of society poorer.
And yet, planned economies have always featured long-term guaranteed housing, while no capitalist economies seem to have.
Are you saying that, for example, 200 years ago, there were more working-class people that were able to work than there are now? Or are low birth-rates something that can be avoided?
The borrowing is because right wing oligarchs evade taxes. If we made sure that the reactionary elite actually gets dealt with, it'd solve a lot.
They do pay tax in Finland, it's much harder to evade than somewhere like the US or UK. And the tax rates are pretty high.
It's easy to think that the government having more money can solve everything, but there's still a limited and shrinking pool of labour available. Money doesn't make young people materialize out of thin air.
If you look at the average age graph for Finland, you'll notice that 70 years ago it was very young (tons of children who don't work) and now it's pretty old (tons of retirees who don't work). In the middle there, it was a very strong economy with a strong workforce.
The only way around this is to start importing young people from 3rd world countries while they can still afford to allow their people to emigrate - as their own populations start aging, they may have to start restricting it. That's unpopular because it drives people's wages down, but if your labour pool is shrinking faster than the amount of people who need to be supported by the labour pool, you need to expand the labour pool somehow. Unless you want to start killing off old people or raise the retirement age to 75 eventually.
That's true, but productivity is also part of the equation. A shrinking quota of young people does not mean that the economy can't be sustainable, when the outpot of a worker grows.
That is why "just money" can actually go a very long way in solving "all the problems".
I don't think I can even imagine what a society that has an average age of 25 even looks like.
Roughly like Lemmy and Discord.
If money is stopping us from helping people, then we need to stop using money, rather than stop helping people.
It... doesn't matter if you use money or not? An aging society has fewer people working, i.e fewer people helping other people? You'll have the same problem regardless of capitalism vs communism. Or rather, under capitalism it might even be easier to abuse young, able-bodied folk into supporting a bunch of people who don't work, we just call those people capitalists rather than retirees or disabled people.
Are you suggesting... stealing?
Well then, tax the rich.
Already explained this elsewhere in the thread, but that doesn't magically make young people appear out of thin air. Money can be used to motivate people to work, it doesn't make them appear out of thin air.
You'll have to start importing people from the third world to make up for your aging society while that's still an option (i.e while they still have enough young people to allow emigration).
I swear it seems that most people here seem to think money alone can solve every issue without humans being involved when it comes to these issues. If that were the case, why do we need people in the first place? Just have the money farm for food, build housing, etc.
Finland right now has the highest unemployment rate in the EU, so lack of young people can't explain this particular problem.
That's the last few years, I'm talking long term. No western society can survive the next century without severe welfare cuts unless everything gets automated or we start allowing a lot more immigrants (yes, eventually possibly outnumbering the native folks). It's a process that has been going on for a while now.
The current high unemployment is mostly because of a weak economy, but the economy itself is weak for a number of reasons, one being that all the taxation wasn't really being invested in things that benefit the economy. A super cynical outlook would be that housing the homeless is part of the problem because that money could've been used to support business growth instead. I'm not going to claim that, but I will say that Finland should've found places to refocus spending a decade ago, not now.
A planned economy could theoretically do this better, but 1) at the expense of people's agency in terms of selecting work, 2) at the expense of nice-to-have nonessential goods and services that we've all known accustomed to, 3) still not forever because eventually retirees will outnumber working-age folk by a huge margin. Even China went for capitalism because that's easier than fully controlling an economy.
Easy concept: Put money in to save and gain money long term -> investment. Conservatives come in and cut so much, that there is no more long term gain -> see all those social investments do not work!!!oneoneeleven!! They only cost money!
This is why I don't trust the "SocDem" way (Scandinavian socialism.) If you let the capitalists control capital, especially media, it's just a matter of time before they ruin everything.