As the United States becomes more socialistic, the grandaddy of socialist nations, Sweden, owes its ongoing success to a gradual rejection of socialism:

In The Capitalist Welfare State, Lund University economist Andreas Bergh explains how Sweden has managed to increase economic productivity despite its large public sector.

Bergh says that despite popular mythology, Sweden is not a socialist success story but instead owes its economic growth to the lowered tax rates and deregulation of the early 1990s, which allowed innovation and investment to flourish. Bergh also discusses how Sweden’s national voucher program revitalized the country’s educational system and warns that Americans who are hoping to emulate Swedish success by growing the public sector are learning the wrong lessons from Sweden.

It’s not a capitalist haven, yet, but there’s a reason Sweden didn’t fail before Greece.

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Monday, May 24th, 2010 at 7:11 am and is filed under Capitalism v Socialism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.