Welcome to Tuesday's episode of Cato Daily Podcast. This is your host Anastasia Glova and today is the 17th of April.

At yesterday's lunch forum panelists attempted to answer the question, should the United States be more like Scandinavia?

Many observers see Scandinavia as an exception to the Western European condition of high taxes, high unemployment, and low growth.

But the Nordic countries seem to have successfully combined an extensive welfare state with robust economic growth.

One of the panelists Johnny Munkhamer, program director at the Timbrough Free

Market Think Tank in Sweden, is our guest today.

What then is your assessment of how your own country Sweden has been doing?

Well, if you look at the Swedish history from 1890 to 1950,

it's an enormously successful society, and that was what we would be referring to today I think as a neoliberal society with

extremely low taxes about 10% of GDP and limited government and so forth and

that's the kind of society that built the success that we still live off.

And from the 1970s and onwards we had enormous problems because of

socialism and state intervention in the economy and big government welfare programs and everything.

And then to solve those problems in the 1990s, we had quite free market reforms.

We reformed the pension systems and we have school vouchers and we have lower marginal tax rates, independent central bank, lots of free market reforms

that actually created a bit more success.

But then again in the last 10 years, so we have not done any reforms at all.

The social democratic government was very passive, didn't do anything.

But now we have a new government from last September, non-socialist government, which is doing

quite a lot of reforms, lower taxes again, deregulations for

smaller businesses.

I could argue that they should do even more but they're starting off in a good way and

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