Hello and welcome to the political orphanage, a home for friendly intellectual vagabonders of all styles.

I'm your host Andrew Heaton.

And today we are going on a journey to Scandinavia, the land of IKEA, Nokia, Swedish meatballs, four, reindeer, and reindeer

meatballs. All care of some very tidy, wealthy little countries which we in the

states use as political footballs. Whenever Bernie Sanders invokes the

splendors of socialism, he's quick to point out he's not talking about socialism in hot countries

like Cuba or Mordor. He's talking about Nordic socialism, by which he means a country where

everyone's basic needs in terms of health care, education, and reindeer protein are provided by the state.

Of course, that's not actually the definition of socialism, at least according to me, or all economists,

also every Scandinavian I've ever fought and or made out with,

which makes me skeptical about promoting an economic agenda of a man who doesn't know the terms he's educating for but I digress

Bernie is projecting his own agenda onto a convenient laudable clutch of national exemplars

Which is incidentally exactly what I do as well. I have my own biases I like to paint on to Scandinavia.

When I look at Iceland or Denmark, I don't see a frosty socialist wonderland with blonde command economies.

I see capitalist market economies paired with social safety nets and very importantly those social safety nets and, very importantly, those social safety nets are administered by

governments which are far more local and responsive than our own.

America has 330 million people in it.

Washington, D.C. Thousands of miles away from California and Alaska.

Whereas Sweden is the largest country in Scandinavia, but it's only got 10 million people in it,

in a geographic area about the size of California or half the size of Mordor.

Iceland has 340,000 people in the entire country.

It's smaller than Tulsa.

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