In America, socialism is a cuss word. In Sweden, it is law. While Americans blame Obama for increased government spending and company take-overs, Swedes are happy with tax increases, and have had most of their industry socialized for decades. With a new liberal President in office, conservatives are worried that America is turning into Sweden. So they paid us a visit to save us from our welfare state before it's too late:

The Swedish-American differences are so big that the Swedes being interviewed here don't even understand the context. No healthcare in any country is free. We pay, through our insane taxes, healthcare payment every month--not only for ourselves, but for other people as well. If you rarely use the service or not is irrelevant. Add to the fact that your basic healthcare will typically take place at an overcrowded municipality hospital with long waiting queues, and that the emergency service in many bigger cities like Stockholm is slowly breaking down. Everything, despite our otherwise high-end healthcare, is not so dandy.

I'm not sure the rest of the people interviewed should be taken seriously: a woman working in an industry is happy with her job (in these times, who ain't?), and Swedish pop star Robin reveals the horror that she's recycling. The show seems to suggest the Swedish model is not that bad, after all, which of course is a biased presentation. Americans would not even tolerate our most liberal (in Sweden meaning critical of welfare nanny government) parties and dismiss them as Communists, which, to be fair, may not be entirely accurate, but it would be fair to say they are soft socialists.

As I've covered before, Sweden suffers from a lot of social issues thanks to decades of socialism. 46%, almost half of all households in Sweden, are lonely households. Teenage depression, promiscuity, alcohol and drug abuse, and other social problems are growing fast. Our police only solves strikingly six percent of all heavy crime. We have huge segregation issues, both class- and race-related, but cultural discussion is stigmatized and the youth feels lost and confused. It's a barrern socialist landscape harvested over decades thanks to government nannying, break down of traditional family values, and lack of cultural backbone.

In short, Sweden is a highly advanced civilization, probably among the most civilized nations of the world today in terms of technology, economics, bureaucracy and trend-following, but it's also a socially self-destructive, empty place where people are reduced to mechanic robots in a system no one knows who or what controls it anymore. America is hardly going to transform to Sweden anytime soon, with or without Obama. In fact, the fact that American Conservatives call Obama a Fascist simply because he allows a few company take-overs and tax increases, just goes to show that Americans truly don't know what it means to live in a Scandinavian-style society. Maybe the two systems have got their individual charms. Both, interestingly, show symptoms of slowly coming to an end.