“Where Would You Rather Live: Small-Government Somalia or Big-Government Sweden?”

I happened upon this obnoxious title of an article above on Huffington Post UK. (The article doesn’t compare Somalia and Sweden, so I won’t discuss the article. My beef is with the title.) Despite the fact that the question is thrown in as a cheap rhetorical trick, the force it plays in the argument for everyday people is significant.

The title implies a similar argument to this strawman video:

The question “Where Would You Rather Live: Small-Government Somalia or Big-Government Sweden?” implies that the “bigness” of government in Sweden is the reason for its relative wealth and stability, while the small government (or absence of government) in Somalia is the reason for its relative poverty and instability. It implies further that Somalia would be like Sweden if it just had “a (big) government.” (We should distinguish between the size of government, on the one hand, from what governments do on the other. But let’s take the argument on its own terms and talk about “big” vs. “small” government.)

The main point I would like to make is that the comparison made in the question is misleading. A better comparison would be to compare Somalia with its relatively big government neighbors and also Somalia before and after it had a big government. The same goes for Sweden.

There is evidence that Somalia (away from foreign-funded war zones) is actually developing faster than its neighboring countries (e.g. Ethiopia) with their “vampire governments.” There is also evidence that Somalia is developing faster than it was when it had a government. This is not to say that Somalia doesn’t have severe problems or that it would be a better place to live than Sweden. But what must be compared is Somalia with and without the kind of government one could expect to have there.

It turns out, the same goes for Sweden.

There is a lingering myth that Sweden is still following the kind of socialist-learning mixed economy it was pursuing in the 1970’s and that it was this move that made them prosperous. The truth is, however, that Sweden’s wealth and stability is mostly the result of a long period of cultural development and free markets that preceded the welfare state, that its wealth relative to other European countries and its social capital were severely eroded due to its welfare state policies. (See, for example, Reassessed: Affluence Despite the Welfare State.) Starting in the 1990’s, Sweden made significant reforms to avoid financial crises caused by its big government policies. Now it is one of the more capitalist leaning mixed economies in the world, approaching the outer limits of Milton Friedman’s idea of combining relatively free markets with voucher-type public services. Sweden remains wealthy “despite the welfare state,” not “because” of it.

Irrespective of the particular evidence about Somalia and Sweden’s economic and social performance with and without “big” governments, we should not be too quickly fooled by specious rhetoric comparing apples and oranges. When dealing with empirical arguments we should try to compare like with like as much as possible and be aware not to be taken in by cheap tricks.