I repeatedly hear (in the US) liberals point to the economic success of governments “like Germany, Norway, Sweden,” etc. as proof that socialist/fascist/interventionist government is a successful form of government. I’ve searched the internet and have gotten a variety of responses from sources with …

I think the best response would be presenting classic Frederic Bastiat lesson “What is seen and what is unseen”. First off, you should demand from your opponent his definition of “economic success”. With high degree of certainty he or she would respond with something like “growing GDP, decreasing …

The reason is simple and goes back to I think a Sweedish politician who stated simply that the difference in the amount of economic freedom between the Northern European Social Welfare States: Norway, Sweden, Germany, Denmark, Switzerland, etc and the USA is not as great as you think it is. This is …

a) These arguments are all based on government statistics. Since the very point in content is whether the government should be meddling in the economy (socialism), this is a bit of a conflict-of-interest within the argument. In general, international statistical arguments are extremely difficult to …

The Myth of Scandinavian Socialism

I think the appropriate “Austrian response” would be to indicate that it’s unscientific in the extreme to compare the United States with Western European social democracies as if all the multifaceted relevant factors are being held constant (technology, money supply, capital structure, population, i…

I think you can start by comparing countries like Greece and Sweden. Both have extensive safety nets, yet one is falling apart at the seams. A big difference between these countries is in capital investment, something the latter has in spades and the former desperately lacks. So, correlation does …

Greece has a high savings rate?

Well, no. What were you inferring from my post? Feel free to prove me wrong though if you’re inclined, though I wasn’t exactly claiming that the reason Sweden is doing better than Greece is because of the high capital investment there and in countries like France. I should edit my post though since …

Cortes, Your post implies that Greece has a higher savings rate than Sweden, which is something that could be true but is a notion that I find fundamentally sketchy.

Response to liberal/socialist/fascist friends' arguments

Economics Economics Questions

John_James July 9, 2012, 6:59pm 7

Soviet Economic Growth

Also, a lot of resources collected on their favorite example, Sweden:

https://wiki.freecapitalists.org/wiki/Sweden#Articles_and_essays

Topic		Replies	Views
So is "Big Government" working well for Germany, Sweden and others? Economics Questions	15	2729	January 9, 2010
Socialism works fine? Economics Questions sweden , empirical , denmark	7	5221	October 23, 2012
Evidence that libertarian states are more prosperous Economics Questions	7	1929	December 16, 2010
"Enlightened socialist europe" vs "evil free-market US" Economics Questions	16	4283	November 2, 2007
Northern Europe countries (Scandinavia) are socialist (very far from austrianism).. then how come they performed good? Economics Questions	18	6040	June 1, 2011

Response to liberal/socialist/fascist friends' arguments

Soviet Economic Growth

https://wiki.freecapitalists.org/wiki/Sweden#Articles_and_essays

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