In 2016, when this record started to catch up to him, Sanders said, “When I talk about democratic socialism, I’m not talking about Venezuela, I’m not talking about Cuba.” As he said on Wednesday night, he’s talking about places like Denmark or, as he’s said at other times, Sweden or Norway.
But just as Cuba and the Soviet Union were never the workers’ paradises Sanders sometimes suggested, those European countries aren’t the socialist nirvanas he claims either. As my American Enterprise Institute colleague James Pethokoukis has noted, “the egalitarian Nordic nations have as many billionaires, relatively, as the U.S. and more concentrated wealth, at least as measured by the share of wealth controlled by the top 10 percent.” The Nordic countries are also free-traders and have many of the pro-business policies that Sanders despises here at home.
Sanders, who favors single-payer health care, routinely says we should follow the example of Scandinavian and other countries. He recently tweeted a list of 27 nations with universal health care. But National Review’s Ramesh Ponnuru pointed out that not one of the countries listed has single-payer health care.
It’s true that the Nordic countries used to be closer to what Sanders has in mind. But that was decades ago — back when Bernie was heaping praise on Communist countries. Those governments recognized that such policies were bad for the economy as a whole, and for the people too. Sure, some European countries have more-generous welfare states and more-progressive taxation than we do. Most also have much worse unemployment and economic growth. But all of that is grist for a different argument from the one Sanders offers. He has an impressive record of seeing only what he wants to see rather than what is — at home and abroad.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/...-wants-to-see/