I spent my initial months in Amsterdam under the impression that I was living in a quasi-socialistic system, built upon ideas that originated in the brains of Marx and Engels. This was one of the puzzling features of the Netherlands. It is and has long been a highly capitalistic country — the Dutch pioneered the multinational corporation and advanced the concept of shares of stock, and last year the country was the third-largest investor in U.S. businesses — and yet it has what I had been led to believe was a vast, socialistic welfare state. How can these polar-opposite value systems coexist? […]

The collaboration goes all the way to the top, where something called the Social Economic Council — consisting of trade-union, business and government representatives — advises the government on major issues. “It’s possible because our trade unions still play a prominent role,” said Alexander Rinnooy Kan, the chairman of the council. “In the U.S., the relationship between employers and unions is adversarial, but here we’ve learned there’s a joint interest in working together.”

There is another historical base to the Dutch social-welfare system, which curiously has been overlooked by American conservatives in their insistence on seeing such a system as a threat to their values. It is rooted in religion. “These were deeply religious people, who had a real commitment to looking after the poor,” Mak said of his ancestors. “They built orphanages and hospitals. The churches had a system of relief, which eventually was taken over by the state. So Americans should get over ‘socialism.’ This system developed not after Karl Marx, but after Martin Luther and Francis of Assisi.” […]

This points up something that seems to be overlooked when Americans dismiss European-style social-welfare systems: they are not necessarily state-run or state-financed. Rather, these societies have chosen to combine the various entities that play a role in social well-being — individuals, corporations, government, nongovernmental entities like unions and churches — in different ways, in an effort to balance individual freedom and overall social security.

New York Times: Going Dutch – How I Learned to Love the European Welfare State

(via Richard Metzger)

See also: Matthew Yglesias’s hoorah for the European welfare state.