Swedish Socialism Moves to Middle America

Tim Worstall has a good piece on Swedish economics that jibes well with what I've been reading in the Financial Times from day to day. It turns out that the Swedes have an election coming up [the FT tells me} that might install a Center-Right moderate in place of the sempiternal Center-Left coalition that has been in charge for more than a decade. Worstall doesn't mention this. What he does is notice what the US liberal leftists overlook:

I will admit that I do find it odd the way that only certain parts of the, say, Swedish, "miracle" are held up as ideas for us to copy. Wouldn't it be interesting if we were urged to adopt some other Swedish policies? Abolish inheritance tax (Sweden doesn't have one), have a pure voucher scheme to pay for the education system (as Sweden does), do not have a national minimum wage (as Sweden does not) and most certainly do not run the health system as a national monolith (as Sweden again does not). But then those policies don't accord with the liberal and progressive ideas in the USA so perhaps their being glossed over is understandable, eh?

So Swedish "socialism" with its sixty percent taxation doesn't exactly fit into the socialist mold that Americans on the far left expect. You really have to check the link at the top to get the full thrust of the piece, but the bottom-line is that the poor in the US live about as well as the poor in the EU, and the rich in the US live a lot better than the EU rich. So perhaps a lot of the whingeing on the left derives from pure green jealousy? Worstall again notes that the EU reports' conclusions do not coincide with the nanny-state lamentations of the wanna-tax, no school voucher, higher minimum wage fingerpointers:

If we accept (as I do) that we do, indeed, need to have a social safety net, and that we have a duty to provide for those incapable or unlucky enough to be unable to do so for themselves, we need to set some level at which such help is offered. The standard of living of the poor in a redistributionist paradise like Finland (or Sweden) seems a fair enough number to use and the USA provides exactly that. Good, the problem's solved. We've provided -- both through the structure of the economy and the various forms of taxation and benefits precisely what we should be -- an acceptable baseline income for the poor. No further redistribution is necessary and we can carry on with the current tax rates and policies which seem, as this report shows, to be increasing US incomes faster than those in other countries and boosting productivity faster as well.

As I said above I'm sure this isn't quite what the EPI actually wanted to tell us. But there it is, from their own report. Which is why I rather enjoy my working life -- sad case that I am -- because I get to read all those reports that really don't tell us what the authors think they are telling us.

Yep, the social-engineering elites in the USA simply march to an economic drumbeat that will lead the US economy over a cliff.

Methinks that, like most victims of academicide, these ivory-tower types would rather bring down the rich than raise up the poor.

Ace and TigerHawk have comments on the Horatio Alger haters among the ink-stained academics and class-war politicians.