I am not trying to insult but rather hopefully be constructive but you need to brush up on your interviewing skills. It seems that you are trying to debate more than interview.

For example instead of saying "In terms of a counter example", you might try it in a form of a question "But what do you think of this counter example". Because then it is more like you are delegating questions your audience might ask.

Also your counter example is kind of misleading because a country doesn't exist forever with what ever policies it has at this moment. Just as you might for example save a bunch of money early in your career and then when you get older go into a spending spree on the money you saved, you can't then say that your better off during the spending spree than when you were saving just because you are getting more stuff. A lot of these Scandinavian countries might have a high standard of living now, but socialism didn't create that high standard of living, socialism didn't create the capital that they are enjoying now.

Austrian Economists like to point out a lot of other examples where governments take the credit for improved standards. For example child labor had already declined before laws banned it. Car pollution had already declined before they created laws that required cars to have lower emissions.

You can even find logical reasons behind this. Imagine if politicians mandated higher standards in car emissions. Suddenly people would be unable to drive their cars (being below the standard), businesses would be unable to sale their stock of cars. Everyone would revolt against a government that did this, they would impeach people in office over this. Instead what happens is, car manufactures produce cars with better lower emissions and patent technology, and then they lobby the government to increase standards which would force their competitors to license their patents. And then politicians take credit for the improved standards.