Moving Day

An explanatory note:
Faithful reader, I realize it has been a good while since I have posted here. It's been very hectic ever since our car and other things arrived on 11 September. With everything going on I haven't been able to get online and give you our news since all previous posts required trips to Andor's to use his computer. Today, however, after missing their first appointment (some things are alike all over) the telephone company guys finally deigned to come by and hooked up our network. Now I'll try to make up for lost time. I'll start with an old post I wrote on the day our stuff arrived and try to fill in the narrative gaps over the next few days. So here it is: "Moving Day."

Moving Day

Well, today is moving day. Our stuff, which has been on its way here since July 24th, arrived on Friday and is being delivered to us this morning. Inki has just gone down to the dock to sign the import papers and drive the car up here while the movers start loading a truck to make the first of two trips from the container. We've been frantically busy getting the painting done and finishing the bookshelf and other things more easily accomplished in a near-empty apartment. On top of all that we had Inki's parents and sister over for Sunday dinner, which went very well, as we managed to pull everything together just in the nick of time. Our home is beautiful and ready for the rest of our stuff. I didn't sleep a lot last night and ended up doing laundry and dishes in the middle of the night while Inki, ever calm, slept like a stone.
Since Inki lived in the States for a number of years, there are no import taxes to pay on our personal items, but the car is another matter altogether. On Friday we paid around $2000 in Norwegian sales tax on the car (which we had owned for over a year) so we could get it out of the container this morning, and on Wednesday week we have to drive it three hours down to Haugesund and back to get it checked out so it can be registered here, which should cost us another $6000 or so. Since the car is coming from outside the EU there are only three places in Norway that can clear it for registration, hence the trip to Haugesund. In the end we'll end up paying more than the $7200 we paid for the car in San Francisco to import and register it here. Even at double the price it's still nominally cheaper than a similar car would cost here, but we're definitely not doing this again.
Norway's government is as paternalistic as they come. This certainly has its upside, since the government takes excellent care of its citizens: health care is essentially free and of good quality, the standard paid parental leave is thirteen months, and government bureaucrats are both competent and reasonable. (Example: the customs officer who took our $2000 in sales tax wasn't supposed to let us pay the tax before we turned in our California plates, which we couldn't do until we could get to the car, which we couldn't do without paying the tax. Catch-22. So Inki just said she'd bring the plates in first thing today after getting the car out, which was good enough for the customs agent. In the States the car would have been lost to us forever, like the soul of an unbaptized infant condemned to eternity in a corrugated steel Limbo down at the dock.)
The downside of this "soft paternalism," as the Economist calls it, is that things that the government frowns on are taxed to the gills. For examples you can look at my previous post on alcohol prices here if you like. Tobacco is similarly exorbitantly priced, but having lost my mother, her mother, and all the other smokers on her side of the family to lung cancer, I am totally on the government's side there....
So where was I? Oh, yes -- cars pollute and thus aren't cheap either, so the government has all sorts of taxes to discourage car ownership. Gas, for instance, is about $8 a gallon, although Norway is sitting pretty with all the oil reserves in the North Sea in its pocket. There are other disincentives. Two bizarre but illustrative examples:
1. We have two friends here who have a sporty BMW sedan. One is a lawyer; the other insures shipping. Both well-paid desk jobs. Still, it made economic sense to rip the perfectly good back seats out of the sedan and set up a wire screen between the front seat and the back so only the front seats could be used for passengers and it could be registered as a vehicle intended to transport things, not people. Why would anyone deface a BMW 3-series like that? Because the annual registration fee for such vehicles is only one-fifth of the fee for passenger cars.
2. My sister-in-law's boyfriend owns a Corvette, in spite of the fact that the national speed limit is 90 km/hour (55 mph) and strictly enforced. Registration fees here depend heavily on the size of the motor, and as a result registering a muscular Corvette would cost almost a half million kroner ($75,000). You can, however, buy one-day "test" plates at a cost of 275 kroner a day ($40). (Since our car is as yet unregistered here, we had to buy two of these for our car -- one for today to drive it up from the dock, and one for the 20th for the trip to Haugesund). So our Corvette enthusiast figures out in advance what days he'd like to drive his baby and buys test plates for those days, garaging the car the rest of the year.
All this goes to show that people respond to economic stimuli and can be managed by a government willing to use its power to do so. If they didn't tax imports so much, people would be importing cars all the time from cheaper places in Europe. (Some do, in fact, since the taxes just make the profit margin thinner for such transactions rather than eliminating it altogether.) The lesson is this: if a government wants to set up a system of fees, it has to expect that everyone will try to play the system to minimize their cost, and if the stakes are high, so are the incentives to find any and all loopholes. Even if that means ripping out seats or scheduling road trips weeks in advance.