Political Slavery! 20% of Norwegians On Welfare Because of Nation's Vast Oil Wealth

By Mike Shoesmith




Via Yahoo News:

OSLO (Reuters) - Everyone in Norway became a theoretical crown millionaire on Wednesday in a milestone for the world's biggest sovereign wealth fund that has ballooned thanks to high oil and gas prices.
Set up in 1990, the fund owns around 1 percent of the world's stocks, as well as bonds and real estate from London to Boston, making the Nordic nation an exception when others are struggling under a mountain of debts.
A preliminary counter on the website of the central bank, which manages the fund, rose to 5.11 trillion crowns ($828.66 billion), fractionally more than a million times Norway's most recent official population estimate of 5,096,300.
It was the first time it reached the equivalent of a million crowns each, central bank spokesman Thomas Sevang said.
(Source)

I've been saying this about my own home country of Canada for many years when it comes to oil and Liberalism. Norway is the perfect example that if not for the oil revenues there would be no Liberalism. Canada gains billions in tax revenue each year which enables large amounts of money to be spent on the liberal agenda which, in a nutshell, involves enslaving the population in order to secure power.

This enslavement is accomplished through causing large numbers of people to become dependent on government programs thereby promoting the sloth addiction.

Via Yahoo News:

"The fund is a success in the sense that parliament has managed to put aside money for the future. There are many examples of countries that have mot managed that," said Oeystein Doerum, chief economist at DNB Markets.
Still, in Norway, oil wealth may have made the state reluctant to make reforms or cut subsidies unthinkable elsewhere. Farm subsidies allow farmers, for instance, to keep dairy cows in heated barns in the Arctic.
It may also have made some Norwegians reluctant to work. "One in five people of working age receives some kind of social insurance instead of working," Doerum said, despite an official unemployment rate of 3.3 percent.

Imagine what would happen if the oil revenues never existed or, Thor forbid, they dried up. People would be forced off the government breast and then forced to use their own wits to get by in life. They would be driven toward self-reliance and rugged individualism, character traits Norwegians were once renowned for. Having spent four years in Norway I can attest to the attitudes which prevail among the older generation, those who lived prior to the oil boom which began when the "Black Gold" was discovered in 1969.

With 1 in 5 people, 20% of the country on welfare "rather than working" due mostly to oil revenues Norway has vindicated this writer. Be careful Canada. Liberalism, a disorder the dictionary defines as an "unrestricted lifestyle", also depends entirely on oil revenues.

Hug an "oil patch" worker today.