The Swedish welfare state’s model of education and social care has, in its social democratic ideological base, displaced market solutions as well as voluntary communities’, the civil society’s, solutions. According to this ideological position, market solutions within social care would lead to the so-called ‘end users’ (preschoolers, school children, patients, the elderly and others) receiving poorer service, as the profit motive would ensure such an outcome.

It was assumed that the person who ran a business in order to make money would deliver services of lower quality in order to increase their profits. Olof Palme’s 1984 polemical statement against SAF (the Swedish Employers' Confederation), at SAF's own congress, about the perils of private alternatives in childcare, captures the essence of this ideologically motivated position:

“With regard to the social care of children, it is their best interests ...