Neuvottelija.com

Podcast · Keijon Tuumaustunti #171 · 2026-03-22 · 1:22:53 · In Finnish

Communism After All? — Sami Miettinen on Keijon Tuumaustunti #171

Published as “Kommunismi toteutuu sittenkin? (Sami Miettinen) #171”

Hosted by: Topi Salin

▶ Watch on Keijon Tuumaustunti

A returning guest and a wide-ranging episode. The framing question in the title is not rhetorical: Miettinen’s argument is that Marx’s end state may arrive through the back door, and that most of Finnish economic debate is arguing about a world that is about to stop existing. Everything below is his reading, and the strong claims are his own.

The government’s report card

The praise is real but graded on the Finnish curve. Structures removed from the employment side, an attempt at nine billion in cuts depending on how you count, the top marginal rate down from 59 % to 52 %, a 25 % expatriate rate, an 18 % corporate rate coming next year, and the inheritance tax now up for replacement with a Swedish-style capital gains model.

The criticism is the larger half. Finland runs €159 billion in public consumption expenditure, which he considers an impossible number — his view is that it would need roughly halving, and that even that would not be enough. He expects none of it to survive the next parliamentary term, on the grounds that voters reliably want a counterweight and the counterweight will be the Social Democrats, and he is unimpressed with the economic analysis in the Finnish press.

Why he thinks the left–right frame has expired

The core argument of the episode, and the reason for the title.

His claim is that the era of financing a state out of taxes on human labour and human capital is ending, because intelligence is becoming cheap. He puts around €400 a month into AI tokens himself and describes the output as roughly summer-analyst work — running tasks from a WhatsApp message, translating episodes, doing research — against a salary in the thousands. His recommendation to listeners is a hundred a month as a floor, on the argument that the skill being learned is delegation and clear instruction, not the tool.

From there the political conclusion. He notes that Musk’s version of basic income is not measured in euros at all but in inference, compute and energy, and that if intelligence is free and robotics is priced mostly at energy plus hardware, then the national income — the human labour base — drops out of the equation. Financing a citizen’s income out of wage taxes then becomes, in his words, an incoherent proposition. His challenge to anyone proposing an AI tax is the simple one: name the base. He pays about a hundred euros of VAT on his own token spend.

The Marxist reading follows: a planned economy becomes a plausible outcome if you call AI planning intelligence rather than market intelligence, and the capitalist extracting surplus value disappears from the equation — though he rejects Marx’s premise that all value reduces to human labour and everything else is expropriation. He is careful about the path: the route there, in his view, runs through unrest, conflict and AI-driven dystopias rather than smoothly.

He states, as a prediction rather than a hedge, that general superintelligence is very likely next year, capable of outperforming any human at any intellectual task — and that the remaining human job is deciding what to point it at.

Why the young are losing

His explanation for the age split in the post-ChatGPT employment data — he cites a Swedish study finding AI has increased work for older employees and reduced it for younger ones — is not about technical skill. It is that his generation spent its whole working life both taking direction and giving it, and can therefore write ten paragraphs specifying exactly what they want, while younger workers have practised neither. The prompt is the same managerial act pointed at a machine.

The corollary is his advice: ask whether you would benefit from a subordinate who costs a few euros a month. If the answer is no, you are in trouble.

On education he is blunt: a philosopher’s proposal to move exams into a basement and write them in pencil is not a solution, because whether facts stick in your biological memory is no longer an important skill. On the objection that AI hallucinates, his answer is that people paying twenty a month have no meaningful ability to steer it — the serious users work with guardrails, goals and iteration.

He also volunteers the limits: AI slop and the uncanny valley. He is untroubled by a machine analysing Tolkien lore, but on live politics authenticity is what carries, and he thinks audiences can hear whether a speaker is saying what they actually believe.

The inheritance tax

He wants it replaced with the Swedish model — no inheritance tax, with the acquisition cost carried over so that capital gains are taxed when the heir eventually sells.

His arguments are practical rather than ideological. Undivided estates are dysfunctional and litigious; the one competent relative who takes responsibility is treated with suspicion by the rest. Finnish households are illiquid — savings sit in half-shares of apartments rather than in listed assets — so a 7–33 % bill falling due immediately has to be paid out of money the family does not have, while lawyers profit from the process. Under a carry-over system the ownership entry simply moves in the database, and the heir decides when to realise, with losses deductible.

He is careful to say the fiscal case is not the point: the yield is negligible against €159 billion of spending. The real cost, in his account, is ownership. Finland has roughly 50,000 people with a million in non-housing wealth and about 8,500 with a million or more in unlisted shares — that is, in companies that employ people — a number he expects to fall to something like 6,000 over the next term. A family holding a substantial block of a listed industrial company cannot sell it into a market with no domestic liquidity, so the tax bill forces a sale to foreign buyers, and foreign buyers are not especially interested in owning Finnish employers. He notes that Sweden’s 2004 abolition cost under one per cent of tax revenue, and that Swedish household wealth has since roughly doubled while Finland’s has stayed flat — €150,000 per adult here against €300,000 there.

Asked whether he would trade the corporate rate cut for it, he says yes: 20 % is already competitive, 18 % is better, but the Social Democrats will restore 20 % anyway as an easy election promise, whereas they are unlikely to reinstate an inheritance tax once it is gone. He also notes that growth companies making losses gain nothing from a corporate rate cut, which is why some startup investors oppose it.

The pension argument

The most technical stretch, and the one aimed at the host’s generation.

Finland has around €290 billion in pension assets against a stream of nearly €40 billion a year going out, funded by what he treats as a 25 % wedge on labour — and he insists pension contributions are taxes, since they leave the pay packet identically, and that whether the employer or employee formally pays is economically meaningless.

His point about the assets is that people look only at the pot. The liability — the net present value of accrued pension promises — has been calculated at figures around €600–800 billion depending on the discount rate, so against €290 billion of assets the system carries a shortfall in the region of €310 billion. Dividing the pot across the population, which he says is the popular proposal, is the wrong sum; the net figure is the one to divide. On his own numbers he is just about cash-flow positive because of his age, while someone in their thirties is deeply negative.

The YEL question gets the sharpest treatment, and the host supplies the anecdote: having founded a company at the start of the year, he names YEL liability as his single largest business risk, worth several thousand a year, despite already paying full TyEL through employment. Miettinen’s objection is to the collective logic — the assumption that entrepreneurs thirty years apart, or wage earners generally, owe each other pensions through a system rather than through anything they actually agreed. His proposed direction: merge YEL into TyEL, draw down the fund, trim public-sector pensions in payment, and shrink the wedge at the working end.

He also mentions the earnings-assessment side: a self-employed person can be assigned a notional income based on comparable roles, which he considers absurd when the comparator is a public-broadcaster salary funded by transfers rather than market revenue.

Sovereignty, universalism and the rules-based order

A digression the host draws out, and worth flagging as the most contested part of the episode.

Miettinen’s position is that the international rules-based order is a set of social constructs — he credits Harari’s Sapiens for the framing while noting many dislike him — and that its authority ultimately rests on somebody’s monopoly of violence. His example is that no international human rights court has any purchase on the Taliban’s treatment of women, and his conclusion is that a nation state can act in its own interest and litigate afterwards.

The constructive half is Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man — he stresses the subtitle and the identity argument people forget — read as: universalism is a right of the nation state, applying to citizens, and citizenship is something earned rather than assumed. He applies this to the expatriate tax anomaly he thinks is genuinely unfair: a foreign specialist arriving in Finland qualifies for residence-based social security immediately and for the reduced rate at once, while a returning Finnish citizen must have been away for something like eight years — he and the host argue about whether it is eight or ten and explicitly tell viewers to check. Economically sensible, he says; on principle, discriminatory.

The libertarian counterweight he offers is his own: he calls himself both libertarian and strongly patriotic, values the sacrifices of earlier generations, and rejects the I’ll leave for Zambia with my bitcoin position as missing what holds a country together.

He also argues that third-sector funding is backwards — that public subsidy makes a supposedly independent civic organisation dependent by definition, and that a society where people expect the state to do everything is less communal than one where they help each other directly.

Where he is actually putting money

The practical close.

The closing note

His parting advice is the same as his opening: put a hundred a month into it, because what you learn is the old skill of asking clearly for something useful — of a colleague or a machine — and having someone willing to pay for the result.

Topics: Finnish Economy & Policy · Ownership, Capital & Tax · AI & Enterprise Tech · ← All media visits · Talks & Events · Markdown mirror: index.md