October 2, 2025

MILTON FRIEDMAN IS STILL RUNNING THE SHOW:

As Kevin Williamson wrote in 2009, when Bernie Sanders made a similar Nordic-themed observation in the Boston Globe:

Sanders is particularly taken with the case of Finland, which he holds up as a model of what a long-term commitment to democratic socialism can produce.

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A critic once asked Milton Friedman what he thought about the fact that Sweden has basically no poverty, and Friedman answered: We don’t have many poor Swedes in America, either.

Sanders acknowledges that the U.S. and Finland are radically different societies: Finland has a few million people overwhelmingly homogenous people packed into a relatively small country; we’re diverse, sprawling, and dynamic. What Sanders can’t quite manage to do, and what his editors at the Globe apparently did not ask him to do, is to progress to the logical follow-up question: Even if we assume that Finnish institutions are desirable, what reason is there to believe that Finnish-style institutions will produce Finnish-style results in the United States, which is a rather different country? There is no reason to believe that Finnish inputs will produce Finnish outputs anywhere other than Finland, and especially not in societies that are radically different from Finland. This is why airlifting copies of the U.S. Constitution all over Africa will not turn Mombasa into Greenwich or Lagos into Austin.

Even making the comparison on Sanders’s own terms, though, his argument is weak: A 2004 Timbro study calculated that if Sweden were to join the United States, it would be the sixth-poorest state; France would be the fifth-poorest. About 40 percent of Swedish households would be considered low-income by U.S. standards.

And unlike previous socialists, he probably won’t be making the trains run on time:

Posted at 8:45 pm by Ed Driscoll