Sweden? They're not "liberals"... they're fucking socialists. Karl Marx himself may as well be prime minister.
Now you're forcing me to go learn stuff about Sweden and like I said on the first page of this thread I really don't care.
This Forbes article is from 2001 but it seems like it's not quite a pure socialist society and whatever they've got going on now it seems they got some extra $$$ to study bovine burps:
The new face of Swedish socialism Swedish snapshot A: Shows a taxed-to-the-eyeballs welfare state where the government grabs more than 52% of the country's GDP—the highest percentage of any industrial country. A Swedish businessman who earns Euro200,000 a year gets to keep just 49% of his paycheck. Of OECD countries, only France comes close to Sweden in taxing its most successful businesspeople (for complete tax data on 33 countries, see "The tax grab 2001," Forbes Global, Feb. 5).
Swedish snapshot B: Shows a booming economy bubbling with entrepreneurial activity. Growth is predicted to be 3.5% for 2001; inflation, 1.7%; unemployment, 4% (less than half the European average). In 1999, according to the European Information Technology Observatory, Sweden ranked first in the world in investment in information technology and telecommunications. Venture capital is pouring into Sweden, and labor productivity is rocketing: From 1990 to 1999 productivity climbed 47% in Sweden, against 39% in the U.S. and 31% (on average) in the EU. Last year, Sweden topped the global standings in R&D spending as a percentage of GDP with 3.7% (in the U.S. it was 3.1%), according to the OECD.
How to reconcile snapshots A and B? Is Sweden a bloated welfare state? Or a People's Republic of Entrepreneurs?
The answer is that it's a mixture of both. But the entrepreneurial part of the mix is rapidly gaining ascendancy. One yardstick is the number of business startups. They averaged 29,000 a year between 1984 and 1989 and 36,000 between 1994 and 1999, an increase of nearly 25%.
Cradle-to-grave security is the rule in Sweden, and has been since the early 1950s (the country went socialist in 1932). Go on the dole in Sweden, for example, and you can get 80% of your last job's pay for at least five years. Like to fish? The government will put you in a twelve-month program to learn how to be a fishing guide. Health care is free. So is education. Hence those obscenely high taxes.
Less well known, however, is that starting in the early 1990s, Sweden finally woke up to the fact that to be successful, a country needs entrepreneurs. No entrepreneurs, no new businesses. No new businesses, rising unemployment. Rising unemployment, politicians looking for new jobs—or new careers. Deciding that they like their jobs, a new generation of Swedish Social Democrats has created a much more friendly environment for business. Sweden is not a capitalistic heaven on earth, but it's not the hell on earth for entrepreneurs that it was until a few years ago.
Consider the distance Sweden has traveled. After some flush years in the 1950s and 1960s (the result, according to Milton Friedman, the Nobel winning economist, of Sweden's "having had the good economic sense to stay out of World War II"), the socialists neutered then exiled the geese that laid the golden eggs. Ingvar Kamprad, 75, the founder of ikea, the $10 billion (estimated worldwide 2000 revenues) furniture retailing chain, describes meetings with Sweden's tax bureaucrats in the 1960s and 1970s this way: "They would accuse me: ‘But you just want a profit.' And I would proudly reply that I was giving people jobs."
Bertil Hult, 60, the founder of the Stockholm-based ef language schools, remembers those dark days well. "By the 1970s, the Swedish media were presenting anyone who started a business as someone who was using the people," he says. "Entrepreneurs were pariahs. So lots of entrepreneurs left. The government's view was, ‘Let them go, we don't need them here.'" In the 1970s Hult left and built ef from Germany, the U.K. and the U.S. Today the privately owned ef Group is the largest company of its kind in the world. Veckans Affärer, a respected Swedish business magazine, estimates that its revenues are $650 million; its net margin is 5%; and its payroll is 17,000.
With entrepreneurs like Hult fleeing, the economy began going down the tubes. Growth slowed, and inflation rose. State spending and debt soared. Private-sector jobs began to disappear.
By 1991 the voters had had enough. They threw out the Social Democrats for the first time since the war and installed Carl Bildt's Conservative government. Bildt set about liberalizing important state-monopolized or dominated markets, notably telecommunications and banking.
the rest here should anyone care to read it:
http://www.forbes.com/global/2001/0319/034.html
