Did you know? Karl Marx's grave is just around the corner from us in Highgate cemetery! It's a bit on the tacky side, but it's pretty cool that he's buried there and that his grave is such an attraction. This memorial was built in the '50s by the Communist Party of Great Britain - before that there had just been a small gravestone, as the 11 people at his funeral could hardly pull together the money or interest in anything more. This is a great segue into my slight correction, which is about calling Denmark a Socialist country in my earlier post.
After listening to another great Planet Money podcast where they try to address the question of what exactly constitutes Socialism, and more importantly whether Obama and the Democrats were turning the US into a socialist country, I was thinking that Denmark doesn't exactly fit the model of socialism in every regard.
They do have a great social welfare state, which goes along with being Socialist. However, they don't have the worker-driven system that Marx was so fond of. Corporate profits are still the ultimate goal, and most people work for private companies, not the government. In this way Denmark is just as capitalist as the rest of the western world. Although their excellent windmill industry is a great example of large corporations combining financial gain and growth with social responsibility. Just wanted to clarify!
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