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.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-bernie-sanders-is-wrong-about-sweden-11566596536Thanks for sharing. The problem with most discourse on the topic is that people think there is some kind of capitalism VS socialism thing going on, rather than recognizing that both are absolutely essential and neither can ever be reomved from the equation. It's almost like the "nature vs. nurture" debate - while good points might be made the whole thing is comedy and needlessly divisive because of course you always have both. There's no way to prevent people from taking care of themselves and being greedy, and sometimes this has a useful result. There's also no way to stop people from taking care of one another and acting as a society (hint - you can read this isn't that cool). Also, this sometimes has a useful result. If we would focus on the details of what policies we like or dislike and how to improve then we would do a lot better than fighting over which word we think means something cool or not.