Societies where money strongly influences politics breed corruption and lose productivity: You can buy political influence with money, of course, but also it works vice-versa: You get money from political influence, by controlling law and policy, rather than as a reward for economically productive activity. The business of the nation, or at least a major industry, becomes corruption.
And most of Europe is more corrupt than the US.
The Nordic countries have their own issues Denmark, Norway and Sweden are currently running minority governments.
Legislation has been halted for quite some time and Sweden is on it's way to a political meltdown.
RE: Corruption, Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Norway are literally four of the five countries in terms of "least corrupt". Their government might be dysfunctional, but corruption, they lack (by that metric). And as I understand it the national-general-contentment-rate (I'm not sure what the actual term is, but some sociological survey was conducted with as much rigor as the soft sciences can produce) those countries have similar ratings for happiness as well.
Though, even if you include the former soviet states, Latvia, Hungary, Poland, etc basically everyone except Ukraine is in the top third of the least corrupt, which is not that darn bad considering.
So is the US, France, Spain, Austria, Portugal, Greece, Italy and Eastern Europe are more corrupt than the US.
As for the Nordic states I haven't argued that they are not, I would say that they are potentially corrupt in other means as nepotism plays more than money but again it doesn't matter.
The US is still one of the least corrupt nations on the planet.
The Inca empire lasted for about 100 years, we can might as well use "Sparta" as they've also allegedly were forbidden from possessing gold and silver (although in ancient world in many places commoners were not allowed to posses gold or silver as they could be used to buy favors ;)).
Growing up in an communist country I saw much less corruption than after we were liberated by democracy and liberal capitalism has been introduced. As a consequence of the system change, the corruption throughout the country rose to the unforeseen levels.
But of course, since communism lost, at least for now, it is an easy target for snarky comments.
My parents grew up in soviet Russia they ran out in the late 80's if they would've waited and survived the turmoil they would most likely have become Oligarchs but it wasn't a good time to be a prominent Jew in Russia and they tell quite a different story.
Every institution was corrupt to the bone, if you wanted to send a package somewhere and for it to actually arrive at it's destination you had to bring 2 loafs of bread and a jar of home made pickles with you to the post office.
Communism like most dictatorships was more or less clean and organized on it's surface. One of the scariest things about authoritarian regimes is just how normal and calm they seem to many people that live under them.
Heck martial law is quite commonly regarded by many to be quite "nice", all crime stops, the streets are clean, no one bothers anyone ofc if any trouble ensues all parties tend to be lined up against the wall and shot but other than that it's almost utopic.
