Fareed Zakaria eloquently busts Bernie Sanders’s myths about Scandinavia. A slice:
Sanders’s vision of Scandinavian countries, as with much of his ideology, seems to be stuck in the 1960s and 1970s, a period when these countries were indeed pioneers in creating a social market economy. In Sweden, government spending as a percentage of gross domestic product doubled from 1960 to 1980, going from approximately 30 percent to 60 percent. But as Swedish commentator Johan Norberg points out, this experiment in Sanders-style democratic socialism tanked the Swedish economy. Between 1970 and 1995, he notes, Sweden did not create a single net new job in the private sector. In 1991, a free-market prime minister, Carl Bildt, initiated a series of reforms to kick-start the economy. By the mid-2000s, Sweden had cut the size of its government by a third and emerged from its long economic slump.
Peter Suderman talks with James Pethokoukis about Bernie Sanders and socialism.
My GMU Econ colleague Bryan Caplan explains that also lethal is socialism.
Here’s wisdom from John Stossel.
Mark Pulliam argues that there is no valid conservative case for labor unions.
Shikha Dalmia makes the case that Americans need no “project” of nationalism. A slice:
What is strikingly absent in America, at least until the “Salute to America” that President Donald Trump held in the National Mall last year, is state pomp and circumstance—military parades with soldiers in crisp uniforms smartly saluting political authorities. As Tocqueville observed, American patriotism is very different from the old-fashioned Old World kind that regarded the nation as a father that created its citizens. Americans, by contrast, love their country because as free and productive citizens, they see themselves as its creators. The nation is their offspring, not their father. (Or the result of their actions, not their designs, as F.A. Hayek might have put it.)
