> First of all, it is important to understand that it is not businessmen who created the markets thanks to which we have such "prosperity", it was indeed the state.

The state creates an environment to allow businesses to flourish, but it is businesses that create prosperity. Specifically, mega-corps. Mega-corps invented the transistor, email, computer networking, AIDS cocktails, etc.

> Second of all, am extremely supportive of small/medium sized businesses, am not a fan of megacorps. I understand that there are several sectors, which benefit greatly from vertical integration, but these should be few and far between and be under heavy regulation, which is not a case today. I think today's governments still do relatively little to actually incentivize people to start a business, there's still an unhealthy amount of risk and worry involved.

Small and medium sized businesses don’t have the economies of scale to do really cool things. They may begin as startups, but to have impact they need to scale to mega-corps. You can’t build an iPhone ad a small or medium sized business.

> my vision is for every Western country to move towards the Nordic model, a strong social democracy.

The Nordic model is heavily dependent on mega-corps. It’s more accurate to characterize those countries as practicing welfare capitalism, rather than democratic socialism. The Nordic countries score among the highest in the world in measures of business freedom.

Norway is hard to analyze because of the massive oil money, so let’s use Sweden. Sweden is heavily dependent on large multi-national corporations: http://www.lysator.liu.se/nordic/mirror2/SI/security/economy...

> The Swedish economy is highly dependent on a limited number of very large international companies. In 1992 the United Nations estimated that there are a total of some 35,000 multinational corporations in the world. Of these, about 2,700 have their headquarters in Sweden.

Sweden has low corporate tax rates (21%, the same as under Trump’s tax plan). It has no minimum wage. It has deregulated or privatized the same industries the US has. It has no farm subsidies. It has no inheritance tax. It has school vouchers.

The Swedish tax system is also flatter. The maximum marginal rate kicks in at about $100,000. There is also a 20% VAT, which is borne mostly by people in the lower income brackets. The result is that each third of the income distribution pays about the same percentage of its income in taxes. That’s very different from the US, which singles out the top 25% to pay a higher percentage of its income in total (state plus federal) taxes. Capital gains rates in Sweden are a flat 30%, about the same as the top rates in New York or California under Trump’s tax structure.

Sweden is not a “New Deal” style social democracy. It implicitly recognizes that businesses create prosperity. So it combines a deregulated market economy, with high taxes on individuals to pay for a robust welfare state. The government doesn’t create prosperity; it simply redistributes it once the income from the corporations passes to individuals.

> Because it has strong unions i.e public interest organizations who negotiate better wages than the minimum one would be, so it is THEM who actually don't want minimum wage there.

Unions in Europe are different in important ways from unions in the US, which makes them unpopular in the US. The New Deal Era NLRA enshrines this concept of the “union shop” where if a majority of workers vote to unionize, the union becomes the exclusive bargaining agent in the employer, and union membership is often mandatory. That system is often illegal in Europe, because it violates workers’ freedom of association.

As a result, the public prefers the current weak level of union influence in the US: https://news.gallup.com/poll/241679/labor-union-approval-ste.... 26% of people want to maintain the weak union status quo. Another 29% want them to be weakened even further (so 55% want same or less union influence). A distinct minority, 39% want US unions to have more influence.