Simply the best! Or is it?

When reading the "Metro" newspaper, one easily finds a certain thing in each day's paper: the public section where people are ALWAYS complaining how s**tty place Finland is to live in. Nothing works, taxes are high, someone even declares loadly that "Finland is a police state and we have no rights!" Many times I have wondered where does this all come from since my perspective is very different... Maybe because I have seen it being a lot worse.

Taxes are high. Yes. I do agree. And our tax system needs some updating. BUT. We have free education. How many would have to give up on higher education if one should pay for it for example 30 000€ / year?

We also have free medical care. Yes, it sometimes doesn't work perfectly and the queues are quite long but still in a case of heart attack you will be taken to the nearest hospital. If this would happen in the USA, you would be taken to the hospital your insurance can cover and even worse, without an insurance your chances of surviving wouldn't be that good.

Finland is clean. We don't even know how much we should appreciate this. We have an excellent system of taking care of the waste. We even recycle. Seen many developing countries I have learned to respect this. Our city doesn't smell. We can breathe fresh air even in the capital city.  Everything is organized. We have to wait our turn in line but at least it is fair. Imagine the situation where everyone would just push themselves in to the counter trying to be the first one. This is everyday in many countries. With the Finnish "sisu", how many broken noses would there be at the end of the day?

Freedom of speech. We can say what we think. We can even write it to a newspaper and we won't get arrested. It gives us the freedom to think and believe in whatever we like.

Four seasons. Oh yes, winters are cold. Freezing more like! But have you ever considered how many bacteria it kills. We don't have dengue-fever. In summer nights we don't have to be afraid of malaria mosquitoes. Isn't it great! And once after the long cold winter we get to enjoy our beautiful summer by clean lakes and forests. And we do take the most out of it.

We have been chosen to be the best place to live, and I do believe that we earn our spot.

How do YOU see it?

Tuition fees – the boogeyman in the closet

If no one else is willing to say it, I will: why do we need to educate foreign students for free when we Finns cannot study anywhere outside of Finland for free? The problem we are facing now is that we are giving education for free for future experts, who as foreign students rarely stay here in Finland after their graduation. Therefore they are not to our society's benefit in the long run by paying taxes etc. - they only exploit it. 

Many studies have shown that the quality of our educational system is high. So why do we insist on handing out our expertise for free when we should be benefiting from it financially. With tuition fees collected from all foreign students including those from the EU, the higher education institutions could improve the quality of teaching even further. Instead of doing this, we simply refuse to even consider having tuition fees for foreign students out of fear that someday they might also apply to us, the Finnish students. The tuition fees could be smaller than for example in Great Britain, this way foreign students would still favour our universities.

Have we so little faith in our most valuable asset and in our equality based society that we are willing to let others exploit our system and us for nothing?