I grew up hearing how dangerous socialists were. After all, the Cold War against the U.S.S.R. could turn hot if we didn’t root out the communists in our midst, as Joe McCarthy warned.

Then I lived in “socialist” Norway and my wife gave birth to our first baby there. The Norwegian health care covered the birth and gave us five thousand dollars to help raise the baby and would deposit $150 into our bank account every month until our son was 18.

This democratic socialist government paid for my year of college in Trondheim, paid our health care, and would pay our pension, if we had stayed. These socialists certainly didn’t seem so dicey after all. They seemed positively civil.

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