The catch is, you must be a Swede who is unemployed and living in the town of Soderhamn. Which definitely shrinks the pool of potential applicants.

Those who sign up get a ticket to the Norwegian capital and are put up in an Oslo youth hostel for a month, with Soderhamn council picking up the £20 a night bill. The package also includes on-the-spot guidance on how to get a job in Sweden’s northern neighbour.

“We had an unemployment rate of over 25 per cent, so we had to find solutions,” Magus Nilsen, the man in charge of the project at Soderhamn council, told the Daily Telegraph. “Going to Norway to find work has always been quite popular with young people, but sometimes they want to go but don’t know how to find a job or accommodation so we thought we’d give them a bit of help with both.”

So far around 100 people have decided to leave Soderhamn. . . .

Don’t let the door hit you on the way out. Who needs you? Go live your fancy new life in Norway, gateway to the very top of Finland!

Has anyone asked Norway what it thinks of this scheme? And why don’t we pay people to move to Norway? Or better yet, why don’t we trade unemployable Americans for employable Norwegians? With a population smaller than New York City, Norway would fit nicely in the Midwest somewhere, while we could empty our prisons, exiling our most violent and disgusting to Oslo. The Norwegians would all be here, and so wouldn’t notice, and the American felons would be free to enjoy the benefits of a northern European nation known for its relatively low crime rate and relatively high rate of private gun ownership!

Win win!

Via Reason‘s 24/7 Newsfeed

UPDATE: So Sweden is the nation that keeps on giving. It turns out that even as it exports workers to Norway, it imports Norwegian garbage — because it cannot produce enough of its own to heat the damn country.

Norway pays Sweden to take its trash, and Sweden gets heat and electricity and then exports the burned debris back to Norway.

“So that’s why we have the world’s best incineration plants concerning energy efficiency,” Senior Advisor for the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency Catarina Ostlund told PRI.

“But I would say maybe in the future, this waste will be valued even more, so maybe you could sell your waste because there will be a shortage of resources within the world,” Ostlund said.

Thinking about the future, Ostlund said she would like to see Sweden import trash from countries outside Scandinavia.

Is the next president of the United States reading this? We can export our garbage to Sweden! This has so many possible social applications, the mind boggles!

And by the way: is this really a case of Swedish efficiency, or is it a matter of another Socialist economy being so feckless that it can’t even make garbage properly?