Before considering the various geopolitical factors that made Iceland what it is today, let’s take a look at what it is today. As an American liberal, born in the Roosevelt years and raised in the Truman years, I began life with the reasonable expectation that I would live to see a day when my country could provide its citizens with at least a minimum guarantee of economic stability; the kind of guarantee Roosevelt outlined in his Economic Bill of Rights, nearly 70 years ago. I assumed that my country could eventually provide all Americans a job that pays a living wage, basic health care, and an education appropriate to today’s world. And I assumed that I would live to see these things—but I no longer believe so. It’s not that these initiatives are not regularly introduced in Congress; they are and always have been. Yet with every proposal, we’ve heard a chorus of conservatives lamenting, “Gosh, we can’t really do that. That would be socialism, and socialism doesn’t work. If you knew anything about economics, then you’d understand that socialism doesn’t really work.”
Well, I’ve just returned from Iceland, and I’m here to tell you: Socialism is alive and well—and it works slicker than snot on a glass doorknob. And everyone is happy with it, there are no problems, and no one is planning to get rid of it anytime soon. Iceland provides its citizens a social net that goes light years beyond anything American liberals have ever proposed, and it works just fine. With the present difficulties caused by the collapse of the Icelandic investment banking industry, (a collapse which American banks caused) a few programs may face a few cuts. But they have no intension of seriously scaling back social wages in Iceland. The basic welfare state is simply not on the table. No doubt, there will be a lively debate, and there will be sacrifices--things are tough everywhere. But these will be shared sacrifices. Iceland's national identity is a history of shared sacrifice, and no one is going to take that from them.
So I put it to you: Why can a chunk of volcanic rock provide all this for its people, whilst America, supposedly the richest superpower on earth claims it cannot? The answer is that they have the political will to do it. But how did they come to have such a will? That is what I will attempt to examine.
First, let’s look at the Geology. If you have any interest in geology at all, then a visit to Iceland should be the top item on your “bucket list.” Iceland is a “one stop shopping center” for geology. It’s got it all—volcanoes, glaciers, earthquakes, geysers, rift valleys, plate tectonics, uplift, subsidence; you name it—they’ve got it. And if you are a guy who likes his geology the way he likes his women—young and beautiful—then come to Iceland. So how young is it? The first volcano poked above the surface of the Atlantic only 20 million years ago. And with an eruption every four years on average, in most places the surface you are walking on was laid down in historic times---and they have a record of it. In many places, there are 5 or 6 volcanic debris layers laid down since settlement, and they have records for each. Pick a layer and they can tell you which volcano did it, when it erupted, how many people were killed—and what their names were. And in Iceland, the rock cycle is in “fast forward.” What arrives quickly sometimes leaves quickly? When I was approaching a glacier near Eyjafjallajokull, I was walking up a stream bed filled with till deposited by the ice as it receded. It was stuff ranging from football sized rocks, (all basalt) to cobble sized, and gravel and sand. But in one area there was a fresh, two inch deposit of volcanic ash, which had started to wash away, as the stream meandered through the nearly level bed. Our bus driver and tour guide said, “This wasn’t here last month—and if we get a good rain, it won’t be here next month. It will all be washed to the sea.”
So how has this affected the economics of the island? Well, on the one hand, without the volcanoes, Iceland wouldn’t be there, and the ash is their main source of fertilizer. But with such frequent eruptions, there is never time to develop thick, tillable topsoil, but just a thin layer that supports grass. And also, several times since settlement, there have been disastrous
eruptions that have nearly wiped out all human life on the island, usually by depositing such a thick layer of ash that it destroyed the grass. This killed off the animals, leaving the humans to die of famine. In one eruption, a discharge of fluorine gas killed thousands of people and animals. And even when the volcanoes are quiet, there is little usable land. The island is so far north that it would be far too cold to support much food production, except for the Gulf Stream. But this oceanic climate does not extend to the interior, which is uninhabitable. So to feed people, we have a fishery and a narrow strip of land along the coast, especially the south coast. Still, these are rich resources which could probably support all Icelanders —if there aren’t too many of them and if everything is divided fairly evenly. But the resource base is fixed and small, and always will be. No application of human sweat or ingenuity will produce significantly more food. Raising more animals will just result in overgrazing and erosion, fishing more aggressively will just hasten the decline of the fishery, which already suffers from overfishing. There is what there is.
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