On Monday Rockwool Fonden, a Danish research foundation, published a mapping of 304 Danish companies that have either moved out of the country or been founded abroad by Danes since 1999.
Most of us read the headline about 22,000 jobs and 280 billion and "held on to the edge of the table", as Mona Juul asked us to, while we bit down hard on the newspaper so as not to do harm to persons or furniture around us.
I, however, got stuck on a different number.
242 of the 304 companies were founded abroad AFTER the founder had left.
So four out of five left before they had become anything. They did not take a company with them out of Denmark. They took a possibility with them, and the possibility only became something once it stood somewhere else.
It is worth laying that next to the advice Norwegian tax advisers give young entrepreneurs today, after Norway in November 2022 tightened its exit tax because people had started leaving for Switzerland - "leave before you are visible, before anyone has put a value on you".
This is happening alongside England, which abolished non-dom and put inheritance tax on worldwide wealth for those who stay.
And alongside the EU, which passed a regulation on artificial intelligence before anyone in Europe had built anything of significance with it. And thereby, strictly speaking, made sure that no one ever will within the EU.
It looks like four different matters. Tax, inheritance, regulation, capital. But it is the same moment that gets hit every time. The moment when something goes from "being possible" to "being real".
Europe has arranged itself so that precisely that transition is the most expensive place to stand, and those who want to get through it have learned to go through somewhere else.
They don't rebel. They just stay away, before they show themselves to the world.
Because you can only tax what does not exist yet if you believe it already belongs to someone. And here Europe is more united than any election campaign lets on.
It was a Conservative chancellor in London who began the dismantling of non-dom. It is Arbeiderpartiet, the Norwegian Labour Party, in Oslo and the Social Democrats in Copenhagen and Venstre and the Conservatives who all share the same quiet assumption - that value comes from the community, from the school and the roads and the security, and that the individual's gain is therefore something that really has to come home again.
That idea has become ordinary decency, and it is not stupid. It is just half. Because in the countries where the Danish entrepreneurs actually become something, the opposite assumption applies, that value arises with the one who carries the risk, and that the community gets its share once it is there.
It is not two tax systems.
It is two views of Man.
One sees Man as a tenant of something that already exists. The other sees Man as the creator of something that did not exist before. And a culture always builds what it believes about Man.
So the risk-willing capital, the specialised people and the experienced founders, which the Rockwool professor says gather in a few growth centres, do not gather at an address.
They gather THERE, where THE OTHER VIEW OF MAN lives.
When you believe that value belongs to the community, the community must also have the right to hold on to it, and that is why the exit tax is the most honest document in the whole affair. Norway tightened it because people left. Sweden looked into it and buried it in June, because it cost more than it brought in. England is talking about it.
An exit tax is a law laid down over Man because the will can no longer be held by anything else. It is laid down because the desire to stay is gone. And where no one stays willingly and out of desire, you build a wall, and the wall is the proof that what was supposed to hold people from within is no longer there.
The Norwegian press called them "tax refugees". I rather like that. Because notice the word.
You only flee from something that holds on to you - and an order that cannot bear anyone leaving is no longer a society. It has become something you belong to. We have just forgotten that we have made welfare the thing we sacrifice to, and the one who leaves... an apostate.
We know that language from somewhere else.
But let that lie for now.
And then there is the number Rockwool Fonden sent out this morning, without anyone connecting it to Monday's.
Four out of ten public employees would demand at least 25 percent more pay even to consider a job in the private sector, because they prioritise stability, flexibility and meaningful work.
877,800 people are employed in public administration and services, and the number rises every quarter. That is not an accusation against them. It is a portrait of ourselves.
We have built a country that asks everyone "how they are doing", and no one "what they want".
It is the same thing again that I wrote about in the way we met Islam.
Therapy-speak.
The therapist asks, "how are you feeling?".
A civilisation asks, "what do you want?".
Inwardly too - towards its own.
Especially inwardly - towards its own.
And the few who answer that last question anyway, who have an answer to what they want, and who see early on that it is never going to happen here, the way we have set ourselves up - they go to someone who asks the question because they mean it, sincerely and with interest. And because they want to help them make it happen - instead of plundering them before, during and after.
It isn't because they are greedy that they leave, and it isn't only because the tax is high, though it is. It is because hunger is not a disease, and we have spent two generations treating it as a symptom.
So the common thread between Oslo and London and Brussels and Copenhagen is neither tax nor regulation nor capital, even though all three are right. The common thread is that Europe has decided that Man is someone who has to be looked after. And someone who has to be looked after must NOT walk out the door with anything.
They went anyway. Quietly. Before anyone had time to see them.
Good for them.
Mona Juul herself uses the word "desire" in her post, and it is the right word, she just hasn't followed it all the way to the door. Because the desire has not disappeared. It always lives in the free, responsible, curious, driven and hungry Human Being who sees the chance to create a better future.
But it has moved. That much is true. And you don't bring it home with an entrepreneurship deal, you bring it home by building a country that once again dares to ask its own what they want, and can bear the answer.
It is a thought worth having.
When you have the time.
❤️🔥🪽
Happy Wednesday, friends ☀️
And no, I have not moved to Switzerland. Not yet anyways.
I actually haven't even had my mid-morning coffee yet.
