President Obama: Don’t become too Swedish!

Mats Tunehag writes in his blog:
Every country, culture and political systems has flaws. We are after all fallible human beings, thus nothing we do will ever be absolutely perfect. Some Swedes tend to believe that Sweden is the "best of all possible worlds". (BTW: Candide, by Voltaire, should be required reading for everyone)
For some Americans Sweden is pseudo-communist, for others it provides the model to follow. But which Sweden are we talking about? Sweden has changed significantly in the last few decades. Sweden has fallen on an international welfare scale; its GDP per capita today is only 80 percent of that of the United States.
Richard W. Rahn has written a thought provoking article and comparative analysis of Sweden and the USA. He is questioning President Obama’s policies and the Democratic Congress which seem to be following the road travelled by Sweden: “Those who wish to chase the Swedish model need first to decide which model they seek: The high-growth, pre-1960 model; the low-growth model of the 1970s and 1980s; or the reformist, welfare-state model of recent years. The irony is that the current Democratic Congress and administration are rapidly emulating the parts of the Swedish model that proved disastrous and rejecting those parts that are proving to be successful.”

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