By Jeffrey Sachs, read him sometime.

"On average, the Nordic countries outperform the Anglo-Saxon ones on most measures of economic performance. Poverty rates are much lower there, and national income per working-age population is on average higher. Unemployment rates are roughly the same in both groups, just slightly higher in the Nordic countries. The budget situation is stronger in the Nordic group, with larger surpluses as a share of GDP.

The Nordic countries maintain their dynamism despite high taxation in several ways. Most important, they spend lavishly on research and development and higher education. All of them, but especially Sweden and Finland, have taken to the sweeping revolution in information and communications technology and leveraged it to gain global competitiveness. Sweden now spends nearly 4 percent of GDP on R&D, the highest ratio in the world today. On average, the Nordic nations spend 3 percent of GDP on R&D, compared with around 2 percent in the English-speaking nations."

The Social Welfare State, beyond Ideology: Scientific American

The trouble is that Hayek is partially right.

So was Keynes.

Finding a balance between those conflicting philosophies is the hard deal.

Eventually most of us get so fed up with the problem we swing in one direction or the other because we cannot stand uncertainty.

RONG?!?!?!?!?!?

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"It is self-evident that no number of men, by conspiring, and calling themselves a government, can acquire any rights whatever over other men, or other men's property, which they had not before, as individuals. And whenever any number of men, calling themselves a government, do anything to another man, or to his property, which they had no right to do as individuals, they thereby declare themselves trespassers, robbers, or murderers, according to the nature of their acts." -Lysander Spooner

"Necessity is the plea of every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants, it is the creed of slaves." - William Pitt