When someone has accepted socialist collectivist premises and is trying to impose as much socialism as he can it is pointless to argue over the variations in Norway. Bernie Sanders is an old Red who, along with his supporters, are counting on ignorance of the injustices of Scandinavian socialist welfare statism to get their foot in the door for that and much worse.

Scandinavian countries had to back off their march into larger scale socialism from decades ago because of the failures, but haven't dropped the collectivist premises. Following Norway is not the answer to Venezuela. For the horrors of the Scandinavian collectivist conformity mentality you should read Roland Hunter's The New Totalitarians unmasking the history and collectivist state of Sweden as of the early 1970s.

The disastrous conservative arguments attempting to oppose socialism by defending the European socialist welfare statism of Scandinavian as "not socialism" have been dissected on this forum at

https://www.galtsgulchonline.com/post...

and

https://www.galtsgulchonline.com/post...

ewv is on-target identifying socialism as conservatism. Ever since Karl Marx, their argument has been "we know how to mass produce - admittedly thanks to capitalism - now we can all share as much as we can make." The problem is that if that were even possible we wouild be frozen in a Utopia from 1848. Not only would we not have cellphones, we would not have hot water on tap in the home. The home water heater was an invention that no central authority paid an academic genius to dream up. (More Vannevar Bush later.)

The inventor of the modern day water heater was Edwin Ruud, a Norwegian mechanical engineer working in Philadelphia. In 1889, he designed “the first automatic, storage-tank type gas water heater.” Ruud founded a company with several other engineers and patented the invention in 1897. -- See https://blog.sense.com/how-americans-... )

Scandavian culture is not unique in this, but they have their own name for it "The Law of Jante." It is mass conformism at the deepest level. It is true that with Nokia in Finland, and other Scandinavian tech succeses, it looks like you can have innovation under socialism. But those are COPIES of what was invented elsewhere first. Invention, enterprise, new ideas from telegraph to telephone to television to radio telescopes, all came from places with maximum personal freedom: the USA first of course, but also the UK and then Germany, France, Italy, etc. ((all much less but still better than, say, Russia, Norway, or the Ottoman Empire.) Capitalism is disruptive.

You cannot predict invention. That is what makes it invention by definition.

That is why the present American governmentalist system of throwing public money at universities has not brought wonderful new products to market. Oh, they have their successes -- in America. What an entrepreneur sees is a system of COMPETING universities. Granted that most are publicly funded with all the problems that that entails, but Ohio State competes against UCLA. UT Austin's McComb School of Business competes against the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. In socialist countries, all of that is CENTRALIZED.

Guiglielmo Marconi is a perfect case in point. Late in life, he was a supporter of fascism in Italy. But early in life he left Italy for the UK and the USA in order to pursue his inventions. And there's more. His "inventions" were challenged for patent infringement by others who had the same ideas earlier. (That's a whole other issue: first to invent versus first to file. But the main point remains.) Creative individuals flocked to the USA, and other places where freedom allowed opportunity. People did not flock to Italy or Germany or Norway or France. Though, true enough MARIE SKLODOWSKA emigrated from totally crushed Poland to much freer France to pursue her education and research.

Moreover, while Italy was a place where you could have found Galvani, Volta, Avogadro, and others, that was BEFORE Italy became a unified state. The same was true of Germany. As a cultural matrix, "Germania" allowed intellectuals who got unpopular with one ruler to move to someplace with a different ruler. But overall, German culture of the 19th century was rigid and conformist. So Germans came to America with their inventive ideas and willingness to bear down and work hard FOR THEMSELVES. Bismark Socialism drove inventive people to America and left behind the people who became Nazis. Go figure...

And that's where Bernie will take us. When the bodies pile up (which they are doing now -- more on that later because socialism is the root failure with Covid-19, too) Bernie will say that he didn't mean it to happen that way. But it will whether he wants it to or not.

THE LAW OF JANTE
You're not to think you are anything special.
You're not to think you are as good as we are.
You're not to think you are smarter than we are.
You're not to imagine yourself better than we are.
You're not to think you know more than we do.
You're not to think you are more important than we are.
You're not to think you are good at anything.
You're not to laugh at us.
You're not to think anyone cares about you.
You're not to think you can teach us anything.

Donald Trump's supporters endorse many (if not all) of those ideas. Remember that pride is a sin. Contrary is pride is not just humility, but also arrogance. The Law of Jante is the arrogance of the crowd. "We don't need no liberal intellectuals. We got all the ideas we need right here. We're going to back to 1960 and Make America Great Again."

Tell the Bernie crowd that Sen. Sanders is just another kind of Donald Trump: a man afraid of change who claims to speak for the masses. And he does. Do you want to be ruled by the masses? Or do you want to make your own decisions?