Quote from: Rikafip on August 25, 2019, 06:11:12 AM

Quote from: squatz1 on August 24, 2019, 11:47:53 PM

People who love the idea of socialism love to tout that Sweden is the best place in the world, and that it is what the USA should be. Bernie in particular echoes these statements, but these people fail to notice one key thing about Sweden -- it has RUTHLESS capitalism embedded in its nation to be able to support their massive entitlement programs.

Sweden isn't a nation that has what some call "warm, fuzzy, friendly capitalism" where people aren't fired (or laid off) and old companies are protected. This simply isn't the case in the least.

Sweden is a nation with much larger taxes on the poor and the middle class, and they feature non-progressive taxes on consumption, social security, and payroll taxes (which make up a much larger percentage of GDP for Sweden.

Sweden literally almost destroyed itself with JUST SOCIALIST policies. But they saved themselves from large scale issues by embracing large scale ruthless capitalism, with low taxes on companies and incentiving companies to come to Sweden.

[Suspicious link removed]j.com/articles/why-bernie-sanders-is-wrong-about-sweden-11566596536

That is a common misconception about Sweden, and Scandinavian countries in general.Socialist all over the world like to use it as an example, but only by cherry picking what they like about it .For example, Bernie Sanders probably forgot to mention that Sweden do not have government-regulated salaries, there is no minimum wage. We all know how Bernie likes to talk about minimum wage Cheesy

Fact is that Sweden is among top countries when it comes to economic freedoms(they are slowly going down on the list due bad policies last years), they have high income tax ( up to 57%) while corporate tax is only 22%, as they realize how important are those that are actually generating income.
Being a socialist country and having some social aspects like " free healthcare"( even though it is hardly free, someone has to pay for it) is not the same thing.

It's important to note that even though there aren't any minimum wages, there are strong unions within Sweden that ensure that wages are high (even if these unions have been weakened in recent times)

Take an example relating to Toys R'Us when they tried to move into Sweden in the 90's. They attempted to try the same thing that they would've done in America, and tried to just high regular everyday workers instead of going to the pool of union workers to find people. But as the unions are much stronger in Sweden, they all said that they weren't going to work with Toys R'Us in any capacity -- meaning that the Truckers union wasn't delivering, retail unions refused to work for them, and so on and so forth.

Kinda sounds like Mafia when you look at it, but these unions forced Toys'R'Us to work with them, one way or another.