The American Left romanticizes the benefits of Scandinavian welfare states — to the point that one is sometimes reminded of Minnie the Moocher’s dream about the King of Sweden (“he gave her things that she was needin’…”).

Tim Worstall dispels that dream in today’s TCS Daily, pointing out that:

In the USA the poor get 39% of the US median income and in Finland (and Sweden) the poor get 38% of the US median income.… Which is really a rather revealing number don’t you think? All those punitive tax rates, all that redistribution, that blessed egalitarianism, the flatter distribution of income, leads to a change in the living standards of the poor of precisely … nothing.