Lets have a look at the top 15 countries in the UN’s Human Development Index:
“The Human Development Index (HDI) is the normalized measure of life expectancy, literacy, education, standard of living,and GDP per capita for countries worldwide. It is a standard means of measuring well-being, especially child welfare. It is used to determine and indicate whether a country is a developed, developing, or underdeveloped country and also to measure the impact of economic policies on quality of life.”
Iceland 0.968
Norway 0.968
Australia 0.962
Canada 0.961
Ireland 0.959
Sweden 0.956
Switzerland 0.955
Japan 0.953
Netherlands 0.953
France 0.952
Finland 0.952
United States 0.951
Spain 0.949
Notice a trend? All the countries that are beating us are much more socialist than we are.
I used to be a big free-market wonk, but the current mess we are in is exclusively due to the ‘invisible hand’ grabbing as much as it can for itself. Damn the consequences.
Yeah, sure, the free market will ‘sort things out’. With a housing/market crash and ensuing mass unemployment. Is this really the best way to handle things?
