NORWAY: Voting Away Freedom

• Share

For four days and nights last week, conservative and moderate deputies hurried to the speaker's stand in the big, drafty chamber of Norway's Storting to cry "Danger!" Their words whistled through the Parliament like the wind; the other side had the votes. This week the longest Storting debate since 1909 ended. Free Norway voted voluntarily, 53 to 39, to take the road towards an economic dictatorship. Behind this move were men who are neither Fascists nor Communists, but deputies of the vigorously pro-democratic Labor Party, which has ruled Norway for 18 years; the same men who battled the Nazis in 1940 and brought Norway into NATO in 1949. Antitotalitarian by conviction and habit, they nonetheless hurried their hardscrabble land toward an economy which Norway's angry businessmen liken to that of Nazi Germany or a Red satellite.

The Law. The legislation the Storting enacted bore the humdrum title, "Law of Prices and Competition Regulations, etc.," but after reading all the small print, a Norwegian shipowner cried, "Which side of the Iron Curtain is Norway on?" The law empowers the government to control prices, profits, methods of calculating business costs, terms of delivery, ways of payment, quality of products, distribution of output, "and other controls . . . on conditions governing trade."

The law is so vague and undefined that few Norwegians can tell where it will end, but already they know where it is going. For instance, from now on the government can tell a firm where to sell, what to sell, or even whether it may sell at all. It can also appropriate any amount of the firm's profits deemed necessary for the general welfare through a special assessment called Utjevningsavgift, meaning leveling duties.

The only hindrance on the government is a requirement that, in cases of great importance, the Storting itself must initiate the leveling duties, but even this safeguard is cold comfort. For it is up to the government in the first place to decide which cases merit the Storting's attention, and in the second place the government can go right ahead without the Storting if it decides that a wait is dangerous. Moreover, businessmen ordered to pay these special levies have no recourse in law.

The single consolation for Norway's free enterprises was that it might have been worse. A companion bill for "Rationalization . . . and the Development of Economical Activity" would have empowered an economic dictator to fire company directors, effect mergers, expand or limit production, or even confiscate industries. Fortunately, even the Laborite-Socialists gagged at this proposal and dropped it. The law that did pass allowed businessmen to keep their jobs, even if it conferred most of their powers on an economic czar.