WE’RE NOT SWEDEN YET! If we were, we’d be cutting taxes and welfare, and letting sick car companies die.

More on Sweden as it is, from Michael Moynihan.

After explaining the benefits of high taxation to Cenac, former culture minister Leif Pagrotsky is asked, with the Daily Show’s trademark faux jingoism, how Sweden could possibly be better than the United States. Pagroysky quickly reels off “free health care,” “free education,” and Ingmar Bergman. We can quibble about whether any of this qualifies as “free” (the family Moynihan just paid our Swedish taxes, and believe me, it ain’t “free”), but after his presentation on the brilliance of a high tax burden, Pagrotsky might have acknowledged that in 1976 Swedish authorities arrested Bergman on charges of tax evasion. In response, the director ripped the ever-expanding Swedish government bureaucracy which, he wrote in a letter to the newspaper Expressen, “grows like a galloping cancer” and very publicly decided to abandon the country for West Germany. Such outbursts were—and still are—frowned upon for those lorded over by Jante’s Law. As one of his Swedish biographers noted, the “Social Democratic press campaign” against the director lasted into the late 1980s, after he had returned from exile.

Good thing we don’t have that kind of politicized press corps here.