Should we go socialist for the benefits? Or can we handle the frugality?

I've been reading about Norway's success with the "cradle-to-grave welfare state and it's got me wondering, like many others, if we should be emulating its frugal northern people rather than throwing our back out with the effort to spread democracy worldwide. I must admit, I'm a little cuckoo for those Socialist cocoa puffs.

Bring on the 12-month paid maternity leaves, the all-access-pass to nationalized health care. Because while capitalism was showing America who's your daddy (in our country, he who has the least morals and the most hunger, laughs all the way to his weekend house in the Hamptons), Norway's socialist finance minister was smugly buying our companies' depressed stock.

The country has a cushy 11% budget surplus, zero national debt, and an economy that grew 3% last year while Uncle Sam was dancing a jig into a 12.9% deficit, $11 trillion in debt, and the recession we now all know and love.