Few nations are as misreported as Sweden. Rather than a socialist paradise, Sweden is actually a nation which has owed its prosperity to capitalism and a fairly, until recently, homogeneous culture. Rather than an argument for the Left, it is a cautionary tale against most of the arguments made by the Left
Dr. Victor Davis Hanson (of Swedish background) will occasionally remind his more liberal readers that the Swedes as a culture are very frugal with money and very intolerant of corruption, which would seem to foreclose of the sort of left-lib California produces ever being trusted with power in Stockholm or Gothenberg.
Sweden seemed to work as a Socialist-Capitalist hybrid, as long as it was largely ethnically homogeneous and everyone “pulled their weight”. Once that was altered, it fell off the rails.
C Matt:
PJ O’Rourke (in his very funny defense of capitalism called “Eat the Rich”) observed that the Swedish unions and industrialists, along with the old Social Democratic Party, had an unspoken agreement that as long as businesses shared profits by allowing wages and taxes to rise proportionate to increased productivity, the unions and government would not demand any more. Swedes paid little more in taxation than Americans into the mid-1960s when the SDP became more radical and blew up the agreement with big jumps in taxes and state spending. The chaos of the next two decades of course blew up the SDP.