The Truth About Sweden's Success

If you're a socialist or social-democrats you're not gonna like this. I've often wondered how Sweden could be both a successful and productive economy on one side and total socialist on the other.

So how did they pulled it off?

According to the video, good old fashioned, get this, capitalism! Ok, not completely but the Swedes know first hand how insane pure socialism and rampant regulation doesn't work. So, they deregulated in the 1970s. Yes, the dreaded "d" word that still haunts American liberals still stuck on 1960s idealism.

The image of Sweden we have is that of a socialist utopia. The truth is, Sweden is far more sensible than that. Apparently, 80-85% of taxes paid are returned to the citizen in Sweden. I'll let you digest that for a second and how beneficial that is to a society. As for Sweden acting as a model for public health, this is the one area that causes problems for them. Like in Canada, public health institutions lead to: Demand greater than supply. Hence, long wait times. The issue isn't about money. There's enough of it but one of supply and demand and how quality and timely services can be rendered in an appropriate manner.

Sweden's long life expectancy is attributed less to public health and more to the fact Swede's simply lead healthy lives by their own choice.

It wasn't social democracy or labour unions (like Quebec nationalists believe) that made Sweden rich. Hard work, trade, innovation  and lower taxes (Sweden doesn't have a progressive tax system although taxes remain high) through strong capitalist institutions is.

Sweden has a common sense approach to capitalism. It carefully selects which programs get the cash and devised an interesting way as to how much each would get. It doesn't seem to squander tax money on hopeless programs like we do here. Merely raising taxes (and throwing cash to shock the system into working) to get more money to meet the cost of a new government program in a notoriously inefficient North American public sector is sheer madness. People are slowly realizating this.