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That seems wrong, as most high tax countries (Denmark, Norway, ...) have full employment and very high standards of living for decades now. Do you have a source for that? Eastern European countries catching up with development don't count, see Piketty.

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> as most high tax countries

Yet you listed two relatively tiny countries. Which don’t even have (relatively) very high taxes.

France, Spain, Italy, Portugal and Greece etc. all have higher taxes on labor

https://www.oecd.org/en/data/indicators/tax-wedge.html?oecdc...

e.g. Denmark and Norway are closer to US than to France

> have full employment and very high standards of living for decades now

Yet those standards have barely improved over those decades. Prior to 2009 the gap between US and the EU was closing, not it is the complete opposite.

Well the tax wedge as defined on that page measures the sum of taxes and healthcare, pensions and social security combined, not the tax alone. For a working class wage in most EU countries, healthcare plus contributions for pensions and social funds will sum up to be larger than than income tax.

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