Liberals love to trumpet the successes of Scandinavia. Whether it’s Sweden’s lavish welfare programs or the social cohesion of lily-white Finland, for some reason the United States needs to emulate these dark and cold nations of rampant depression and suicide. 

However, even with their supposed perfect policies, these countries distinctively suffer, as Michael Booth at the Guardian described earlier this week: 

Take the Danes, for instance. True, they claim to be the happiest people in the world, but why no mention of the fact they are second only to Iceland when it comes to consuming anti- depressants? And Sweden? If, as a headline in this paper once claimed, it is “the most successful society the world has ever seen”, why aren’t more of you dreaming of “a little place” in Umeå?

Did you know that Denmark has the highest amount of private debt per capita in the OECD? Or that its citizens work until Thursday every week just to pay their income taxes?

How about the fact that Norway is actually the most xenophobic of all the Scandinavian nations, granting asylum to only 5,000 people in 2013, a peak year for requests?

Then there’s Finland, which has the highest murder rate in western Europe and the highest suicide rate in the North.

Finally, don’t forget about Sweden, one of the world’s largest arms exporters (arming our comrades in Saudi Arabia, of course). Youth unemployment there is higher than the UK’s, and is greater than the EU average.

But don’t worry. We, like the great states of Viking yore, just need to raise taxes, increase spending on education, ban all guns, and, much to the chagrin of progressives, decrease immigration exponentially on an annual basis to become great. I look forward to those days, indeed.