The problem is that ultimately politics is what Wolfgang Pauli would call 'not even wrong'. You can make any idiotic claim between cause and effect and no one can do a controlled experiment to prove you wrong. The fact that socialism has failed nearly everywhere it has been tried (Venezuelans are currently starving to death despite their country possessing more oil than Saudi Arabia) doesn't matter as long as the socialists can point to a few nations that haven't imploded yet.
Take JurisDictum's graph for example. I suppose he considers this rock solid proof that if only we had more social programs like Denmark things would be better. If I claim that inequality is more persistent in the US due to our more diverse cultural and ethnic mix, or because the bankers own the country, or that more social programs are unlikely to work given that we've already increased spending by a factor of 30 since the Great Society, neither of us can truly prove the other is wrong in a scientific way.
The bad news for socialists is that European socialism will implode soon anyway. Europe is already being torn apart by Muslim immigrant, and since the Muslims have many, many more children than the natives . . . . either the Europeans go full on Nazi and kill them all, or the Muslims will simply vote them out of their own homelands (and you are kidding yourself if you think a Muslim state won't have Sharia law). Neither is particularly appealing.
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