[CryptoPunk]

>>Hmm? A statement saying that a large government (and likely high taxes) inherently causes a bad outcome doesn't need a long-term graph to be falsified. Scandinavia is sufficient, even much of western Europe on top of that.

The bad outcome is a country doing worse than they otherwise would have. You can never prove that happened, because you can't run the experiment twice, so you try to find evidence to make a reasonable case for/against it, as the next best thing.

One way to do that is to look at large datasets, to see what the general effect of the policy seems to be when the experiment is run multiple times on varying countries. The size of the dataset helps to minimize the impact of other factors, given that those factors should average out as the dataset gets larger, thus hopefully exposing the impact of the factor under study.

In any case, Scandinavian countries saw stagnation in their rate of wage/economic growth after adopting social democracy, so they are not a counter-example.

The reason Scandinavia and more generally, Western Europe, are prosperous today is because they were the most free-market-based economies in the world for the longest period of time. Their lead over the rest of the world has shrunk since the 1960s, when they started to massively deviate from their adherence to the free-market rule set.

>>Just saying that The Free Market believers aren't famous for their concern for the poor

That characterization is nothing more than an effective smear job by rent-seeking insiders that depend on the state's suppression of people's private property and contracting rights for their privileges - like unionized workers - and left-wing populists.

>>The latter is the most obvious example of not caring for the outcomes of the Free Market on the poor.

You assume that because you assume profit-motivated activity, free markets, contract rights, and opposition to the Democratic Party, are all harmful to the poor. This assumption is deeply mistaken.

EDIT:

Responding to below:

I throw that advice back at you.

Sweden is typical of Scandinavia. Sweden had the third highest per capita GDP in the world in 1968. By 1991, after two decades of rapidly expanding social welfare programs, it had fallen to 17th in the rankings:

http://iea.org.uk/sites/default/files/publications/files/San...

Until the 1960s, Sweden had both been one of the most free market economies in the world, and most rapidly growing economies in the world, for around a century.

[cloudfifty]

You seriously need to read up on Scandinavian economic history, because you have it exactly backwards and this isn't even something that is disputed.

Update:

> I throw that advice back at you.

You're wildly extrapolating using the already established bad measurement of GDP. Do you believe that social democracies primary concern is increasing GDP per capita? Have the living standards been significantly worse in Scandinavia? No, the opposite.

Economic growth is not an end in itself, it's also not an indication for how well off he people in Scandinavia are compared to others. It's indisputable that the average Scandinavian citizen has enjoyed very high living standard for the last 80 years or so. Even with very large public sector and high taxes. This blatantly disproves the notion that this is not possible as you suggested above.

[CryptoPunk]

>>You're wildly extrapolating using the already established bad measurement of GDP.

GDP is not a bad measure..

I think you're getting overly emotional, and not assessing my points rationally. For example, these counter-examples are not on-point:

>>Do you believe that social democracies primary concern is increasing GDP per capita?

I already argued why they should be: increases in per capita productivity are the primary source of improvements in quality of life.

For example, the reason the Scandinavian region had the highest quality of life in the world by the 1960s, when it had yet to create expansive social programs, is that in the preceding century, it had been the fastest growing economy in the world, with the most free market policies:

http://iea.org.uk/sites/default/files/publications/files/San...

• Scandinavia is often cited as having high life expectancy and good health outcomes in areas such as infant mortality. Again, this predates the expansion of the welfare state. In 1960, Norway had the highest life expectancy in the OECD, followed by Sweden, Iceland and Denmark in third, fourth and fifth positions. By 2005, the gap in life expectancy between Scandinavian countries and both the UK and the US had shrunk considerably. Iceland, with a moderately sized welfare sector, has over time outpaced the four major Scandinavian countries in terms of life expectancy and infant mortality.

• Scandinavia’s more equal societies also developed well before the welfare states expanded. Income inequality reduced dramatically during the last three decades of the 19th century and during the first half of the 20th century. Indeed, most of the shift towards greater equality happened before the introduction of a large public sector and high taxes.

Hong Kong and Singapore, the two most free market jurisdictions in the world over the last several decades, have caught up to and surpassed Scandinavia in key measures of quality of life, like life expectancy, despite being far behind them in 1960.

Economic development is the primary source of quality of life gains.

>>Have the living standards been significantly worse in Scandinavia? No, the opposite.

Absolute strawman, that really shows no grasp of what my argument is.

>>It's indisputable that the average Scandinavian citizen has enjoyed very high living standard for the last 80 years or so. Even with very large public sector and high taxes. This blatantly disproves the notion that this is not possible as you suggested above.

I never said it is not possible, so that is a strawman. I said that the rate at which the economy, and with it, quality of life, improves, slows down with marginal increases in the suppression of market rights via top-down regulatory impositions and taxes.

And once again, this is demonstrated by the fact that the more free-market based Hong Kong and Singapore closed a massive economic and quality of life gap with Scandinavian countries since the 1960s, and even surpassed them in some metrics, like life expectancy.