In search of an opinion on how such soak-the-successful policies affect the truly successful, I visited the tiny town of Misvær, a mountain hamlet in the country's interior, 38 miles north of the Arctic Circle. To get to Misvær, I took a small plane from Oslo to Bodø, where I was met by a gorgeous twentysomething blonde in a flight suit. She was, I somehow knew instantly, the pilot for Inger Ellen Nicolaisen, the country's answer to Donald Trump and the most flamboyant character in a country that prefers its wealthy to go about their business modestly.
After a short helicopter ride over a fjord and some mountains, we touch down in a snow-covered backyard, where we are greeted by a positively feudal scene: Nicolaisen trots out from the house, a modernistic structure perched far above the rest of the town like some enormous suburban castle, followed by five dogs—two Great Danes, two toy poodles, and a bulldog. She has shoulder-length platinum blond hair and wears teal contact lenses and knee-high boots, looking entirely unlike the 52-year-old mother of three that she is. "Welcome to Miami," she yells above the roar of the helicopter.
She leads me inside, where we are attended by a pair of servants who bring us coffee, pastries, and, though it's not quite noon, champagne. Nicolaisen's husband—her second, a 39-year-old former professional soccer player— eventually shows up and immediately begins assisting the servants. Later, he shows me around the grounds on a six-wheel all-terrain vehicle. There are the grazing sheep, the three teepees equipped with heat, electricity, and full bars—Nicolaisen uses the structures for corporate retreats—and the pack of Icelandic horses. As we rumble around on the ATV, it seems clear to me that these are the sort of people who should be animated by the wealth tax—and who won't mind saying so.
But they aren't, not really. Although Nicolaisen considers herself a conservative, she told me the issue that most animates her is poverty, not taxes. "Yeah, the wealth tax is a problem," she says. "But you have to make a choice. You can live in the Cayman Islands and pay no tax. But I don't want to live in the Cayman Islands. To live in Norway, you have to do what you have to. I think it's worth it."
Nicolaisen is famous for being the host of the country's version of The Apprentice and for founding Nikita, the largest chain of hair salons in Scandinavia. Over 26 years, Nikita has expanded into a hair care conglomerate called Raise, whose concerns include a line of private-label products and 120 salons in Norway and Sweden. Nicolaisen owns the $60 million company outright. Her story, which she tells in a best-selling memoir, Drivkraft—Norwegian for driving force—is a triumph of scrappiness. Nicolaisen dropped out of high school at 14, when she became pregnant. In her late teens, she supported herself and her daughter, Linda, by hawking handmade children's clothes. In her early 20s, she moved to Bodø and got a job as the receptionist in a hair salon. She took up with the salon's owner, they eventually married, and she got hooked on the hair business.
Nicolaisen was never much of a stylist, but her entrepreneurial ambitions quickly outstripped her husband's."My first goal was five salons—that seemed like a big goal," says Nicolaisen. She would eventually divorce her husband and take over the business completely. By 2000, she had expanded to 50 salons, and she found herself at a crossroads. She was booking $21 million in revenue a year, and the company was throwing off enough cash to allow her to live well. "I had to decide: Should I relax, stop growing, and just earn a lot of money, or should I expand?" she says. "I realized I couldn't stop there, so I set the next goal at 500. Because, you know—5, 50, 500—it made sense."
I would have thought that Norway's tax system would discourage this kind of thinking, but it doesn't seem to have been a factor. When I asked her why she bothered growing, she said simply, "I'm an entrepreneur. It's in my backbone."
This was the attitude of even those entrepreneurs who strenuously objected to the Norwegian tax regimen, which I learned when I traveled to Stokmarknes and visited the region's best-known entrepreneur, Inge Berg. Berg's company, a fish-farming enterprise called Nordlaks, is a half-hour's flight north of Bodø. The cold North Atlantic waters there make for ideal spawning grounds for salmon, cod, and herring.
We hop into an inflatable skiff and, with Berg in the cockpit, motor across the fjord to one of the company's 23 fish farms. There are three floating pens, barely visible from a distance, each housing 50,000 teenage salmon jostling to catch the food pellets that are being blown over the pens from a nearby barge. When Berg started as a fish farmer, it was his job to hand-feed the fish, dumping bucket after bucket of feed over the pens.
From the farm, we take the boat back to Berg's slaughterhouse and packing facility, where the same salmon will eventually meet their demise at a breathtaking rate of one fish per second. "One of the reasons we've been successful is that we've focused exclusively on salmon and trout farming—some other companies tried to expand to the tourist industry or the cod industry," Berg says over the din of the machines. "We invest everything in improving the process." Berg proudly catalogs a number of innovations—a flash-freezing process, a robotic packing system, and a fish oil plant that ensures that no fish scrap is wasted. For now, the oil is mainly used in livestock feed, but Berg brags that he has made sure it is approved for human consumption, then proves his point by pouring me a shot of the viscous pink liquid. (It smelled and tasted awful, but to his point, I did not die.)
