Hate to break it to you, but "from each according to their abilities and to each according to their needs" has been stacking far, far more bodies over the past ~125 years.
Yes, its comparable to communism, they're both far up on the leaderboard, with religion.
There's something between those extremes that works very well and produce societies that are great for all people, regulated markets and socialised democracy.
In many regards USA has more regulations than the Scandinavian countries do, so isn't really a freer market. So that difference isn't about number of regulations but just taxation rates.
Depends on which regulations you look at. Employment isn't heavily regulated there as they have strong unions and contracts tailored to their specific needs that would otherwise be ill served by broad strokes regulation. Then they have strong regulation in environment, food, drugs, etc.
US also has strong regulation in some aspects, but its less impactful these days due to regulatory capture, those were created when the free market was for example killing babies with unpasteurized milk, and tried to avoid doing that due to cost by putting formaldehyde in it instead. Free market believers want to go back to that age where companies are completely unregulated and hired guns to break up unions and believe this wont happen again. What regulations do is put everyone on the same playing field, so there's isn't one milk company that can lower costs by not pasteurized its milk.
