https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/03/can-you-say-death-panels-bruce-bawer/
On paper, the six million citizens of Norway are among the luckiest people in the world. Thanks to profits from North Sea oil, the nation’s sovereign wealth fund is worth over $1 trillion, which comes to about $200,000 a head. Norwegians earn good salaries, on average, and even though they shell out a lot in income taxes – as well as the world’s highest taxes on gasoline and alcohol – they’re supposed to receive a great deal in return, namely free education up through the graduate-school level (if they choose to go that far) and a social-welfare system that promises to serve the needs of the disabled and unemployed as well as to cover the costs of everyone’s medical care from cradle to grave.
But the promises are one thing, the reality another. In recent decades, like other countries in Western Europe, Norway has welcomed massive numbers of immigrants, an alarmingly high percentage of whom seem destined to be lifelong welfare clients. In Norway as elsewhere, this has put a severe strain on the treasury. Priorities have had to be identified, and choices have had to be made. The nature of those priorities and choices is reflected in two recent news items from the land of the fjords.
One of the reports concerns a family of five in Seljord, a small town in the mountains of Telemark. Ghiat Kanaan, the father; Riham Abouaisha, his wife; and their three children, Bana, Ghazal, and Omar, came to Norway from Syria about four years ago, presumably as asylum seekers. It’s not clear from the news story, which was posted on the website of NRK on March 4, whether anyone in the family has a job; all we know is that they can’t afford to buy their own residence. As a rule, such families are placed in rental apartments on the taxpayers’ kroner, in addition to being supplied with furniture, a car, and regular bank transfers to guarantee them a decent standard of living.
Now, however, under “From Renting to Owning,” a new program initiated by the Seljord municipal government in order to ensure that “people like the Kanaans” stay in the area (why this should be a desideratum is also unclear), the Kanaan family have their own “dream house.” They picked it out themselves; the municipality of Seljord bought it for them to live in, while retaining the title; eventually, they will become its owners. The Kanaans were one of the first two families in Seljord to benefit from this program, which plunked down a total of about $500,000 for the two houses. The report on the Kanaans’ new house was treated in the media as a feel-good story.
An op-ed that appeared at the end of February in the newspaper Bergensavisen was the opposite of a feel-good story. Under the headline “The Right to Breathe,” 21-year-old David Instebø Vang, a native of Bergen, explained that he was born with cystic fibrosis (CF) and that he is expected to live to be somewhere between 40 and 50. “The question is really what will give way first – the intestines, the pancreas, or the lungs? I would bet on the lungs, because it already feels as if they’re running on empty. Breathing isn’t easy, and talking is usually followed by coughs and hacking. Breathing, for me, is like breathing through a straw while running at full speed up and down the stairs.” And this is just one of several very unpleasant symptoms that make living with CF a painful daily struggle.
