Democratic Socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders – a big government guy of all people – unwittingly plugged for small decentralized government when early in the 2016 New Hampshire debates he urged Americans to “look to countries like Demark, like Sweden, and Norway to learn what they have accomplished for their working people.”
Sanders was on to something important, but he didn’t think it through. Because in Denmark, it’s not the politics that matters — it’s the small size. Smaller is better.
Denmark is a small, culturally cohesive and homogeneous country, with a population of only 5.7 million, in an area about half the size of Maine. For centuries it has been a tightly knit country of ethnic Danes proudly steeped in their identity and without much of a tradition of immigration. It is about as different from the diverse, 325 million population, 3.8 million-square mile behemoth the U.S. has become.
The Danes are pleased with the type of government they have – a celebrated welfare state of like-minded people in which many pay an average of 80 percent of their income into a myriad of taxes: income, both national and municipal, VAT, sales, gas, property, church, 8 percent healthcare contribution, and 8 percent supplementary pension.
In a country as geographically large, ethnically diverse and heavily populated as ours, it would be a virtual impossibility to get every soul or even most souls singing out of the same ideological hymn book. Big government is by its nature cumbersome and inefficient, particularly where towns and cities are isolated from each other by great distances.
In contrast, governments of small democracies become more reflective of all their citizens – more nimble and able to implement national policy more efficiently without the need for a vast bureaucracy stretching out over great distances.The Framers intuitively realized that fifty “Denmarks” would be a more manageable than single, distant centralized government. Hence, we are a republic in which power is allocated between state and the federal governments. States call most of the shots when managing local affairs – or so the Framers intended when they wrote the Tenth Amendment.
This is why Denmark succeeds. Being small and homogenous, its government is more reflective of and responsive to the consensus ideology of its people. And in fact, the Danes consider Denmark itself too large to be managed by a single, centralized state apparatus. Instead, they have created five administrative regions that are structured somewhat like our cities. These responsible for administering all national social and health services.
In a country the size of the U.S., these challenges would make the case all on their own for a decentralized republican form of government. And even if we restored the proper balance between the powers of the federal and state governments, the challenge of governance at the federal level would be far more complex than the one faced by Denmark’s government today.
Bernie Sanders didn’t ignore these facts when he held up Denmark as the example. But how odd that they never even entered his mind.
John Reiniers is a retired attorney.
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