>>Hmm? A statement saying that a large government (and likely high taxes) inherently causes a bad outcome doesn't need a long-term graph to be falsified. Scandinavia is sufficient, even much of western Europe on top of that.
The bad outcome is a country doing worse than they otherwise would have. You can never prove that happened, because you can't run the experiment twice, so you try to find evidence to make a reasonable case for/against it, as the next best thing.
One way to do that is to look at large datasets, to see what the general effect of the policy seems to be when the experiment is run multiple times on varying countries. The size of the dataset helps to minimize the impact of other factors, given that those factors should average out as the dataset gets larger, thus hopefully exposing the impact of the factor under study.
In any case, Scandinavian countries saw stagnation in their rate of wage/economic growth after adopting social democracy, so they are not a counter-example.
The reason Scandinavia and more generally, Western Europe, are prosperous today is because they were the most free-market-based economies in the world for the longest period of time. Their lead over the rest of the world has shrunk since the 1960s, when they started to massively deviate from their adherence to the free-market rule set.
>>Just saying that The Free Market believers aren't famous for their concern for the poor
That characterization is nothing more than an effective smear job by rent-seeking insiders that depend on the state's suppression of people's private property and contracting rights for their privileges - like unionized workers - and left-wing populists.
>>The latter is the most obvious example of not caring for the outcomes of the Free Market on the poor.
You assume that because you assume profit-motivated activity, free markets, contract rights, and opposition to the Democratic Party, are all harmful to the poor. This assumption is deeply mistaken.
EDIT:
Responding to below:
I throw that advice back at you.
Sweden is typical of Scandinavia. Sweden had the third highest per capita GDP in the world in 1968. By 1991, after two decades of rapidly expanding social welfare programs, it had fallen to 17th in the rankings:
http://iea.org.uk/sites/default/files/publications/files/San...
Until the 1960s, Sweden had both been one of the most free market economies in the world, and most rapidly growing economies in the world, for around a century.