Paul Krugman takes a look at the Horrors of Socialism in Denmark.

Last weekend, Trish Regan, a Fox Business host, created a bit of an international incident by describing Denmark as an example of the horrors of socialism, right along with Venezuela. Denmark’s finance minister suggested that she visit his country and learn some facts.

That’s silly; she can’t visit Denmark, lest she be thrown in the gulag.

Denmark has indeed taken a very different path from the United States over the past few decades, veering (modestly) to the left where we’ve veered right. And it has done just fine.

American politics has been dominated by a crusade against big government; Denmark has embraced an expansive government role, with public spending more than half of G.D.P. American politicians fear talk about redistribution of income from the rich to the less well-off; Denmark engages in such redistribution on a scale unimaginable here. American policy has been increasingly hostile to organized labor, and unions have virtually disappeared from the private sector; two-thirds of Danish workers are unionized.

Ok but so then Innovation is Stifled because who wants to innovate only to see the $$$ go to the workers? And with Innovation Stifled, nobody is inventing ever-larger cars with ever worse gas mileage and ever more power to crush everything in their paths.

Conservative ideology says that Denmark’s policy choices should be disastrous, that grass should be growing in the streets of Copenhagen. Regan was, in effect, describing what her employers think must be happening there. But if Denmark is a hellhole, it’s doing a very good job of hiding that fact: I was just there, and it looks awfully prosperous.

That cannot be, because of the Stifled Innovation! Everyone knows this.

Danes are more likely to have jobs than Americans, and in many cases they earn substantially more. Overall G.D.P. per capita in Denmark is a bit lower than in America, but that’s basically because the Danes take more vacations. Income inequality is much lower, and life expectancy is higher.

Yes but that’s not the goal. The goal is to have a tiny number of people at the very top who have more $$$ than everyone else combined. That way the tiny number of people who own all the cash get to enjoy everyone else’s poverty. Contrast is all.

Denmark doesn’t at all fit the classic definition of socialism, which involves government ownership of the means of production. It is, instead, social-democratic: a market economy where the downsides of capitalism are mitigated by government action, including a very strong social safety net.

That’s the unclassic definition of socialism, and ain’t no pointy-headed New York Times columnist gonna tell us different.

U.S. conservatives — like Fox’s Regan — continually and systematically blur the distinction between social democracy and socialism. In 2008, John McCain accused Barack Obama of wanting socialism, basically because Obama called for an expansion of health coverage. In 2012, Mitt Romney declared that Obama got his ideas from “socialist democrats in Europe.”

In other words, in American political discourse, anyone who wants to make life in a market economy less nasty, brutish and short gets denounced as a socialist.

And then Joe McCarthy comes back to life and drags everyone off to hell.

The simple fact is that there is far more misery in America than there needs to be. Every other advanced country has universal health care and a much stronger social safety net than we do. And it doesn’t have to be that way.

But it does have to be that way if your goals are more house-sized cars and peppermint-lobster coffee drinks and universal envy.