4 Good Socialism Sweden
Nobody was teaching four-year-olds to smoke in Sweden. Nobody was doing anything bizarre there. I was walking through Gamla Stan, the Old Town in Stockholm, when it struck me that Sweden was the only country I’d ever been to with no visible crazy people. Where were the mutterers, the twitchers, the loony importunate? Every Swede seemed reasonable, constrained, and self-possessed. I stared at the quaint, narrow houses, the clean and boring shops, the well-behaved white people. They appeared to be Disney creations—and not from the new, hip, PG-13 Disney rumored to be opening a Scotch-and-Water Park. This was the Disney of the original Disneyland. Gamla Stan had the same labored cuteness, preternatural tidiness, and inexhaustible supply of courtesy from its denizens. I half-expected to turn around and see someone dressed as Donald Duck. Instead, I turned around and saw someone dressed as the king of Sweden. Which, in fact, he was. King Carl XVI Gustaf was riding, in a gilded coach-and-four with footman in knee breeches holding on behind, right down the middle of the street in a country renowned the world over for its utter egalitarianism. I’d gone to Sweden in February 1996 to find a socialist paradise. I was looking for someplace that had the prosperity of Wall Street without the chaos of Albania, someplace where wealth was better spread around than a free market tends to spread it, and where economic life had fewer shocks and alarms. And I’d gone to Sweden in February on the theory that anyplace can pass itself off as paradise on a balmy summer weekend, especially a place where nude volleyball was pretty much invented. But let us look at paradise when the days are so short that if you take an afternoon nap, you not only wake up in the dark, you miss sunrise. And as for the temperature: “It’s not so cold,” say the Swedes. “We’re
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