The FT article is mostly focused on the challenges facing some countries, notably Greece, over their spending:

Storms over public finances are lashing southern Europe as financial markets force governments across the continent to take a single-minded approach towards cutting spending, raising tax revenues – and, in most cases, both.

But it’s the chart that goes with the story that is far more interesting. At the top of the chart is Greece, which is forecast to have a gross government debt in 2010 of 124.9 percent of GDP. Not good.

 Way down the list, however, with a forecasted gross government debt of below 50 percent are Finland, Sweden and Denmark–the last with a 35.3 percent figure.

 Three countries whose governments do the following:

 1. Provide health care to every man, woman and child from birth to death.

 2. Provide a government-backed pension for every individual. There are no employer-sponsored pensions. The pension system is healthy and strong.

 3. Ask people to pay their fair share by making sure that everyone pays taxes and significant ones at that.

 4. They are able to do #3 because they have a strong wage policy that does not allow an underclass to develop–and, therefore, everyone pays taxes.

 Would any economist on the right seriously try to argue that either of those three countries aren’t quite prosperous?

 Compare those policies to our country’s failure to have a serious debate about how we structure economic power:

 1. A government that allows private insurance companies to drain tens of billions of dollars of profits into private hands and saddles industry–small businesses and large businesses–with huge health care costs.

 2. A non-Social Security pension system that, as it destroyed more secure, traditional defined benefit pensions, is a travesty–forcing millions of people to gamble, on their own, with the 401(k) system that has now bankrupted the retirement future of millions of Americans.

 3. A tax system that, from payroll tax to income tax, puts a huge burden on the middle- and working classes, while allowing the top one percent to pile up a larger share of the wealth in the country so that we now have the largest divide between rich and poor in 100 years.

 4. A wage system that encourages poverty as a way of doing business. There is no other way to explain a country where union-busting is accepted, the minimum wage is a poverty-level wage and one in five Americans does not have good-paying work. So, millions of our citizens cannot afford to contribute to the public good–other than with their slave labor that contributes only to the corporate bottom line.

  Two more notes.

  First, it is a stain on the Democratic Party, in my view, that given the crisis we are facing, there is a deafening silence when it comes to a serious debate about the military budget–a 2011 proposed gargantuan $708 billion. The Scandinavian countries do not face that immoral burden.

  Second, it’s also true that the Scandinavian financial managers, though they were a bit burned by some unwise investments, on the whole, have had great returns and were not over-exposed to the contagion washing around the world.

  Why? In a word, greed. Or, in their case, the lack of greed as a cultural imperative.

  So, our problem is not too much government. It is that we don’t have enough honest, sane government. We have a government bought and paid for by big corporate interests who have perverted the economy, making inefficient use of our nation’s wealth at great cost to our financial stability.

  The solution, then, is not to cut governments role in shaping a rationale and productive economy for our citizens. It is to roll back the corporate intervention in the setting of the rules that make a healthy society.