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Matt Yglesias has a good post on Denmark. He points out that Denmark has far higher taxes than the US, especially on the middle class. He also points out that Denmark has much more efficient provision of public services.

Consider health care, which is almost 18% of US GDP, and more like 10% in Western Europe. Now suppose the US moved to complete socialized medicine, without dramatically cutting the pay of doctors and nurses. Assume we also adopted the other aspects of the Danish social welfare model. Denmark’s government currently spends about 57% of GDP. If the US tried to deliver the same services, without reducing costs from the current level, it would cost at least 65% of GDP. It’s not possible to raise that much money without dramatically reducing total GDP—making us much poorer.

Matt points to some other examples of waste, such as the fact that transportation projects in America are far more expensive than in Denmark (or in the rest of Europe, for that matter). So it might require even more than 65% of GDP. Democrats don’t tend to talk about this problem, because part of it is caused by their constituencies. And we know that when push comes to shove, they care more about public employees than social welfare programs (recall the education voucher debate.)

And of course Denmark is actually more capitalist than America, a point that Yglesias overlooked.

The fact that Bernie Sanders is being fundamentally dishonest about the nature of Scandinavian “socialism” does not mean that we shouldn’t try to emulate Danish policies. I do view their system as superior to the US, because it’s more capitalist and more utilitarian. But that’s a low bar—why not aim higher?

Matt shows a list of the happiest countries in the world, where Denmark comes in third. It’s kind of a bizarre list (the US is at 15, squeezed between Mexico and Brazil.) But suppose you actually believe this stuff. It’s worth noting that the US scores higher than every single large European country (over 40 million people); higher than Germany, France, Britain, Italy, Spain, Poland, Ukraine, Russia. That suggests to me that the US policy regime is superior to the European policy regime. Or any other large country regime, except . . . Mexico??

And let’s go one step further. The very highest country in the happiness rankings is Switzerland. Soon after Matt provides this ranking, he asks:

3) How did Denmark get to be so awesome? Taxes. Denmark does it with really high taxes.

Taxes certainly explain the social benefits Matt discusses, but what about the happiness ranking? Since the Swiss are much richer than the Danes and also seem happier, why not emulate Switzerland? The Swiss have the smallest government in Western Europe (as a share of GDP), indeed even smaller than in the US. So let’s shrink our government to be more like the Swiss.

When I mention this proposal to progressives they invariably say:

“Switzerland is a small homogenous country, its model is not applicable to the US.”

I then ask; so which model should the US copy? And they respond:

“Denmark” or “Sweden”

I usually spend the next 10 minutes rolling on the floor laughing, before pointing out that at least Switzerland has four different languages. They also have more immigrants than other European countries.

I wish we could have an honest debate. The Dems could say, “We want to be more like Denmark.” The GOP could say, “We want to be more like Switzerland.” Then show American voters the taxes paid by the middle class in both countries, and the public services provided in both countries, and let them decide.

Unfortunately, the Dems don’t actually want us to be anything like Denmark, nor does the GOP want us to be anything like Switzerland. Hence the debate over “big government” is all a sham.

HT: TravisV

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This entry was posted on October 17th, 2015 and is filed under Scandinavia, Switzerland, Utilitarianism. 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.



