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You're definitely showing a small brain on this one. Maybe you don't know that communism is a form of socialism, not just some empty insult, as you appear to think it is. I don't think there's anything more socialist than a major national welfare system. It most definitely is not the government's job to make sure everyone has a job. WTF? Get off your ass and have some responsibility for your own damned self. Sweden does pretty well for itself, but they're the exception. Look at every other socialist or communist country in the world, even respectable major countries like France. They're all easily outperformed by the United States.
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1) Sweden is not socialist, but incorporates some small facets of it (and to a lesser degree with passing years)
2) I can't speak in detail for every European country, but there is some form of national welfare system in ~all of them (at least the western ones). Do you consider Germany socialist?
3) I find it very funny that Norway, Sweden and Iceland all outperform the US by GNP (link
here), all countries which could be deemed the most socialist in Europe. This goes double when you consider the absurd amount of worker rights, vacation time and average work weeks compared to the US.
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Per capita GNP statistics across international borders are very misleading. In fact, by your own data in the link you provided, European economies grew by 20% from 2004 to 2005 when we know that simply isn't true. Rather, that reflects a currency shift of 20% or so.
To get a true measure of each countries output, you need to go one link deeper in the data you provided, to the PPP, the Purchasing Power Parity, where you take the effects of currency fluctuation out of it. If you do this, then the numbers come up as:
(3) US 42000
(4) Norway 41650
(8) Iceland 35490
(17) Sweden 32440
Of the three countries named, two really don't match well with the US. Iceland is a country of 250 thousand, that hardly can compare to an economy of 300 million. Norway is a major oil exporter, but that is rapidly changing, even the Norwegians acknowledge that, and they have a major economic crisis coming as the North Sea oil runs out. Sweden can be compared as it's fairly large, and a mixed economy like the U.S. And when you figure in the cost of everything, they're about at 75% the level of the U.S. in terms of what it's citizens can buy.
As far as taxes go, total tax burden in the U.S. is something like 25-26% of GDP, Sweden is 50-51%.