Norway Shrugged 🇳🇴🤷

Recently, my story as a Norwegian entrepreneur facing an unrealized gains wealth tax bill many times higher than my net income went viral, amassing over 100 million views on X. A few years ago I publicly called out that this tax is both impossible-to-pay and nonsensical, but no politician would listen. So I made the difficult decision to leave my home country. I still don’t know how I was supposed to pay the tax, but I recently found myself plastered on the "Wall of Shame" at the Socialist Left Party's offices.In this post, I'll delve into why there's an entrepreneurial exodus from Norway, how we got here, and what the future might hold.Socialist Left leader and me on the “Wall of Shame” (Dagbladet)Norway: A real life Atlas Shrugged Ayn Rand's 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged paints a vivid picture of a dystopian society where government overreach and socialist policies kill innovation and demonize entrepreneurs. In Rand's world, working hard and taking risks is not celebrated, but looked at with suspicion. As the government tightens its grip, mandating how businesses should operate, the nation's entrepreneurs begin to vanish and are nowhere to be found. People get poorer while the state keeps growing. Step by step the functioning of society starts to crumble. The trains first go off schedule, then start crashing and eventually stop going all together.Present-day Norway mirrors this dystopia in unsettling ways. Taking risk with your own money, working hard and then making a profit is frowned upon. While politicians spending the people’s money on non-viable green projects, and delivering dysfunctional public services at high costs has the moral high ground. The government is spending 35 Billion NOK on offshore wind that industry experts think is financially unviable. This is about the same amount as the total wealth tax revenues. Norway spends 45% more than Sweden on health care per capita with approximately the same health outcomes. Norway has 2,5 times bigger share of the working population on sick leave than Denmark. Norway spends ~50% more than Finland on primary and secondary school with worse results.With unshakeable ideological conviction, socialist politicians are rapidly undermining Norway’s wealth creation. They're imposing taxes that explicitly disadvantage Norwegian business owners, and are often straight up impossible to pay. When confronted with the reality that you can't pay taxes with money you don’t have—or that loss-making businesses can't afford massive dividends just to cover owners' wealth taxes—the response is vague moralism like "Those with the broadest shoulders must bear the heaviest burdens." Any argument against any part of the system is by default invalid because there’s free health care…Norway's entrepreneurs are now indeed disappearing from society. In the past two years alone, a staggering 100 of Norway's top 400 taxpayers, representing about 50% of that group's wealth, have fled the country to protect their businesses.Norwegian trains have for a long time been notoriously unreliable - even less reliable then in war time Ukraine! In chilling similarity to Atlas Shrugged there've been two train crashes, including one fatal, in the last month alone.Tram crashing into a retail store in Oslo 29th of October 2024 (NRK)The Unrealized Gains Wealth Tax: A Self-Inflicted WoundNorway imposes a wealth tax that taxes unrealized gains at approximately 1% annually. Calculated on the full market value for publicly traded assets and the book value of private companies. On New Year's Eve, whatever your net worth - including illiquid assets - is subject to this tax.