Liberalism can never work. Why? Because the world has proven time and again that Socialism never works.
But they say “we are not for Socialism!” There is no really no difference in Liberalism and Socialism. They might agree that Socialism does not work, but then insist their form of Liberalism is not full Socialism, but only an attempt to cure the flaws in Freedom by having “only a little bit of Socialism.”
But that is a fantasy. Here is why: Liberalism is against human nature. It is against Nature, period. Human nature is that each individual is constantly striving to improve his condition. Even altruistic acts improve ones own condition. Nature is widely believed even by the liberals to be Darwinian. (Show me a liberal who believes in Creationism). Darwinism can be stated to say each individual seeks its own best interest.
But Liberalism is based on the idea of “from each according to his abilities to each according to his needs.” That is, forced wealth redistribution. But that is against Nature.
Here is why it won’t ever work: when you have a Liberal government in control, you find that there are unintended consequences as human nature (sometimes called “the market”) seeks to undermine the government controls.
Whenever you have a controlled market, you also have a free market, referred to as the black market which seeks its way around the controls. To the extent that the free market is allowed to work, the control system may appear to be working in spite of itself. But when the free market is repressed, the controlled market, which is by definition inefficient, fails.
Just look at Detroit for a perfect example.
And when the liberal government stays in power in spite of the failures, it resorts to the only solutions it has: more control, more tyranny, more blaming of the free market.
So the result is that to solve the failures of Socialistic control, more control is added. Here is another perfect example: because Obamacare is a “train wreck”, you can expect the single payer solution to be put forward fairly soon. In fact, you might conclude that the strategy of Obama all along was to create the train wreck to pave the way for the real goal of single payer; that is, fully socialized, government-controlled health care.
So you cannot have “just a little bit of Socialism.”
Well what about Sweden? That is a whole discussion of its own that I would love to have.