Imagine that you get a brand-new job. The first thing your employer does is hand you the keys to a bright and pleasant flat right in the centre of Oslo. You eagerly ask what the rent is, but your boss smiles and shakes his head:
No, you do not pay rent here. The electricity is completely free as well, as are the internet and TV packages. If the sofa or bed becomes worn, you simply call a caretaker, and we will buy you a new one at the community’s expense. If you want your family to join you, or perhaps your partner, just let us know, and we will simply provide you with a larger and more luxurious home.
It does not stop there. When you are out and about in Oslo, you have your own taxi card that automatically sends the bill to the state. If you are travelling, whether abroad or within Norway (with or without family), you have your own travel arrangement that allows you to use taxis and hire cars free of charge, as long as you yourself consider it to have some connection with your job. And right here we need to pause and explain. The extremely good ‘salary’ that politicians in Norway have awarded themselves is justified on the grounds that they so often have to be available around the clock. They can therefore also take taxis around the clock, to any place and on any occasion. They need only note that it was in connection with something political, such as discussing politics with someone. The entire system operates on the principle of personal trust. In other words: Anything goes.
If you are flying, you do not have to stand in the long, sweaty security queue with everyone else; you have your own VIP shortcut (Fast Track). And if you are travelling a long distance, you of course fly in the wide Business Class seats at the very front of the aircraft, where the food and luxury are included. You do not even have to spend time booking the tickets yourself or completing travel expense accounts; an army of taxpayer-funded secretaries and tailor-made apps does all the paperwork for you.
Your salary – or ‘annual remuneration’ as it is officially called – is NOK 1,272,209 a year if you sit in the Storting, and NOK 1,815,703 if you sit in the government. The Prime Minister receives no less than NOK 2,234,978. But best of all is that you hardly need to spend a single krone of this million-krone income on surviving. Housing, electricity, all-inclusive travel, parking, ‘holidays’ and most of the food you eat, as well as all transport, are already paid for. Your million-krone salary therefore becomes, in practice, pure pocket money that you can put straight into your savings account or use for private investments, while the rest of society has to count every last krone during the cost-of-living crisis. Our politicians therefore have no understanding of the price level and how it affects people’s wallets. They get all their food free in canteens, at meetings, courses, seminars or constant gatherings of one kind or another where three-course luxury dinners are included. You will not find them at Rema.
This sounds like a wild fantasy, or perhaps the everyday life of a protected elite in some distant regime. But the truth is that this is the entirely normal economic reality of our own senior politicians in Norway. While ordinary people are crushed by high food prices, interest-rate rises and electricity bills, the country’s political elite has walled itself into a system in which it has bought itself complete freedom from economic realities. They have created two parallel worlds in Norway: one world for the people and an entirely different world for those who govern. The total cost of maintaining a single seat in the Storting has now passed NOK 2.55 million a year, and the entire machinery drains taxpayers of more than NOK 708 million every single year, solely to keep the elite’s own special privileges and its own recycling apparatus running.
The childhood bedroom and the empty houses
Let us take a look at the housing system. The basic idea was originally sound. If a person from Finnmark or Southern Norway is elected to the Storting, that person obviously needs somewhere to live in Oslo. But instead of requiring politicians to rent a flat on the open market and pay their own way, like all other commuters, they chose to build up an exclusive housing stock of around 160 prime flats in central Oslo.
The value of these properties today is NOK 1–1.3 billion. They are properties owned by the people, but over which politicians have an exclusive right of use – completely free of charge. They do not pay a single penny in rent, and they notice nothing of electricity crises. Taxpayers pick up the entire bill for grid charges and unrestricted consumption through the Storting’s administration in any case. If a representative chooses to bring a spouse and children to Oslo, the Storting and the Office of the Prime Minister stand ready with larger, fully furnished family homes.
For decade after decade, this system was based on pure, unsupervised trust, which led to the massive commuter-housing scandals. Senior politicians such as former Christian Democratic Party (KrF) leader Kjell Ingolf Ropstad were registered as living in their childhood bedroom at their parents’ home in order to retain the free luxury flat in Oslo tax-free, while privately owning and renting out other properties. President of the Storting Eva Kristin Hansen was in reality living with her husband in Ski – only 29 kilometres from Oslo – but gave an address in Trondheim in order to qualify for the commuter benefit. Has there been any aftermath? No, but there are exceptions – for the Progress Party (FrP).
When ordinary people report an incorrect address or improperly received benefits to Nav, they face police reports and immediate custodial sentences. But for elite politicians, the criminal cases were dropped by the police and Økokrim. The reasoning is a study in systemic self-protection: The police believed that the Storting’s own internal rules were so poorly written, unclear and full of grey areas that politicians could lawfully claim that they had simply ‘misunderstood’. The politicians have therefore administered their own rules of the road so vaguely that, in practice, they function as a legal shield protecting them from the Penal Code. They have to endure a little shame and quietly pay a token amount of back tax behind the Tax Administration’s duty of confidentiality, but the prison doors remain closed. In most cases, merely issuing a public ‘apology’ is enough, and the matter is settled.
Travel privileges and subsistence-expense cheating at taxpayers’ expense
The Storting’s travel budget costs taxpayers NOK 40–50 million annually. Individual representatives regularly burn through more than NOK 300,000 each on travel – equivalent to almost NOK 1,000 a day, all year round. The state mileage allowance has been increased to NOK 5.30 per kilometre, providing a direct financial gain on top of all expenses for tolls, ferries and parking being covered in full.
When government ministers need to get around, the government car service stands ready with armoured luxury cars and professional private drivers from the Police Security Service (PST). Ministers do not have to think about public-transport chaos or parking fines. And when the Office of the Auditor General (Riksrevisjonen) conducted a major investigation and scrutinised 50,000 travel expense claims, it uncovered a shocking culture: There was an absence of genuine oversight. Politicians submitted travel expense claims in which they systematically sought loopholes, such as claiming full, tax-free subsistence allowances in cash for food at hotels and conferences where the meals had already been prepaid by the state. They thus secured a double benefit – free luxury food and money for food at the same time.
To manage this enormous administrative workload, the state transfers more than NOK 200 million annually in parliamentary group support (partigruppestøtte). This is money the parties use to pay an entire army of advisers and secretaries. These secretaries function as personal assistants who enter itineraries, book hotels and complete the politicians’ digital travel expense accounts, so that the elite does not have to spend its own precious time on tedious paperwork.
The lottery win when your health fails
There is one scheme that may be the most unfair of all, and that is the sick-pay scheme. Ordinary employees hit a brutal wall after exactly 52 weeks of illness. If you are ill for more than a year, you are transferred to work assessment allowance (arbeidsavklaringspenger, AAP) from Nav. You then lose more than a third of your income overnight, and you have to submit to a rigid bureaucracy in order not to lose the little you have left.
For members of the Storting, no such wall exists. Because they are elected representatives, they have complete financial immunity from time limits. A politician can be on sick leave on 100 per cent of a million-krone salary throughout an entire four-year term. They have no Nav caseworker breathing down their neck, and no one threatens to cut off the flow of money. Ordinary taxpayers, meanwhile, have to foot an enormous double bill: Since the seat in the Storting cannot remain empty, a substitute representative is summoned to Oslo. Taxpayers must then pay the full million-krone salary of the person on sick leave sitting at home, and at the same time the full million-krone salary, travel expenses, subsistence allowance and free commuter accommodation of the substitute representative who steps into the chamber as a replacement.
What happens, then, if a politician needs an operation? From the rostrum, they speak warmly of the public health service, but because their million-krone salaries are freed from fixed living costs, they have enormous private purchasing power. They can easily shell out a few thousand kroner for private health insurance or go directly to private hospitals. There they are guaranteed specialist assessment and surgery within ten days. While an ordinary industrial worker or nurse has to remain in the public healthcare queue for more than six months in severe pain, the politician can buy their way past the queue in less than two weeks. They get the best of both worlds: They avoid healthcare queues in everyday life by privately buying a ‘queue-jumping ticket’, but are protected by the community’s billions through taxation if acute, life-threatening illness should strike them.
The pension bonus and the hidden 2 per cent exemption
The safety net for old age follows exactly the same pattern. The state’s direct annual cost of politicians’ pensions amounts to NOK 53.7 million. Younger politicians today have to wait until they turn 62 or 67 to draw the money, but the scheme is a state-guaranteed net scheme that is completely protected from the coordination traps and cuts that affect ordinary people. The parliamentary pension is paid as a pure, guaranteed bonus (for example, around NOK 3,700 extra per month for 12 years of service) on top of the ordinary National Insurance pension and other private pensions.
Most critically, politicians have exempted themselves from the mandatory pension contribution that all other employees in other jobs have to pay. An ordinary employee automatically has 2 per cent of their salary deducted each month for pension savings. Politicians pay NOK 0 out of their own pockets; taxpayers cover the entire contribution for them. This amounts to a hidden pay rise for each individual politician of around NOK 25,444 annually – money they receive as extra cash in their account each month instead of it being locked into a pension fund. In total, this exemption costs taxpayers more than NOK 4.3 million annually.
The boardroom cartel and the revolving door to the upper class
When senior politicians lose an election or choose to step down, they experience a law of gravity all their own. They never fall back down to earth among ordinary people; they are recycled into a closed circuit of power and money. First, they are guaranteed three months of ‘severance benefit’ (fratredelsesytelse) with no requirement to seek work, after which they can receive ‘transition benefit’ (omstillingsytelse) for a further six months. Many then make use of the notorious ‘limited-company trick’ (AS-trikset): They establish a private consultancy company the day after stepping down, lock the profits and fees inside the company, and claim to the Storting that they have no income. They can thereby receive full post-employment pay from the state into their private account while simultaneously building up wealth in their own company.
The state and semi-state apparatus then stands ready with open arms. Senior posts such as County Governors (statsforvaltere, formerly fylkesmenn) or directors of major government directorates function as a permanent reception centre for former party grandees. Even more lucrative is the boardroom cartel. Norway has enormous state holdings in companies such as Equinor, Telenor, DNB, Statkraft, Vy and Posten. Around these boardroom tables sit the same former politicians, receiving between NOK 400,000 and NOK 1,000,000 a year for attending 8–12 meetings. That amounts to an hourly rate of many tens of thousands of kroner, financed entirely by assets that fundamentally belong to the Norwegian people. This entire boardroom machinery, including five-star hotels, gourmet dinners and Business Class travel to strategy meetings abroad, drains the community of between NOK 160 and 180 million every single year.
When they are not sitting on state-owned company boards, the route leads to private PR agencies, where they sell their ‘knowledge’ of the ‘back rooms’ and their personal networks to the highest bidder. In Norway, the largest parties have consistently blocked the introduction of an official lobbying register. PR agencies and billionaires can move in and out of politicians’ offices in secret, without the public ever finding out who has influenced billion-krone decisions, subsidies or tenders.
The Oil Fund’s green diktat and the Epstein shock
The power elite does not stop at Norway’s borders. Our shared Oil Fund, which has grown to an astronomical NOK 24,000 billion and owns around 1.5 per cent of all listed companies worldwide, has largely ceased to operate according to purely economic principles. Under the leadership of Nicolai Tangen, the fund has been transformed into the ultimate global political instrument of pressure for promoting the new green world order.
The Oil Fund does not appoint its own people to board positions abroad; it exercises a far more feared form of power at general meetings. Every single year, the Oil Fund casts more than 110,000 individual votes at 11,000 general meetings. This digital army of bureaucrats in Oslo uses our collective savings as an instrument of economic blackmail. If a giant international company (such as Tesla or Apple) does not submit to the strictest demands for emissions cuts, wind power or gender quotas on boards, the fund moves in and votes NO to the re-election of the company’s executives – as we saw in the public power struggle against Elon Musk. In alliance with private, opaque American advisory firms (such as ISS and Glass Lewis), global capitalism is forced into a political agenda on which ordinary people have never been given a vote.
But the deepest darkness is found in the back rooms, and the case has exploded legally and diplomatically. The international Epstein files from the US Department of Justice have triggered an earthquake that the Norwegian power apparatus is no longer able to censor or control. Former Prime Minister Thorbjørn Jagland has formally been charged by Økokrim with aggravated corruption, and the police have carried out dramatic raids on three of his properties after the Council of Europe lifted his immunity. Emails revealed luxury trips to Epstein’s private island and requests for secret bank loans.
At the same time, the high-profile diplomatic couple Terje Rød-Larsen and Mona Juul have been charged with aggravated corruption and complicity after it was revealed that Jeffrey Epstein had named the couple’s two children as personal heirs to millions in a will shortly before he died. Norway’s Økokrim is now investigating the case fully through a joint investigation team (JIT) with French police. The pattern shows that while missteps by opposition politicians (cf. Søviknes) outside the establishment are pursued as massive media campaigns for months, charges that strike at the very heart of the power elite are quickly played down in the media under the label ‘ongoing investigation’ in order to protect the system’s public image.
The socio-economic conclusion: The poverty trap
All of this leaves a picture of a society divided into two opposing economic realities. On one side, we have the poverty trap, which affects ordinary people. In today’s Norway, it is extremely expensive to be short of money. The cost-of-living crisis forces those with the least to buy cheap, processed food that in the long term destroys their health. They have to remain in healthcare queues for months because they cannot afford private alternatives. They have to buy cheap consumer goods that quickly break, and if they need to borrow money for necessities, they are rejected by the banks and forced into credit-card traps with interest rates of 15–30 per cent, meaning that they pay four times as much in order to survive. Every single krone must be documented to a rigid Nav bureaucracy.
On the other side sits the privileged class. By eliminating their own housing costs, electricity bills, travel expenses and pension deductions, politicians have transformed their million-krone salaries into luxury. They have bought themselves private immunity from the healthcare queues and refusals of medicines that they themselves impose on the people. Their sick-pay scheme functions like a financial lottery win that safeguards their million-krone existence undisturbed and without Nav interference, while taxpayers obediently have to foot the double bill for their substitutes.
Norway’s power elite has ceased to be the servants of the people; they have elevated themselves to the people’s guardians. They take 100 per cent of the financial security and taxpayer-funded privileges, while taxpayers are left with 100 per cent of the financial risk, the cost-of-living crisis and the bill for the feast.
