The thing about Europe is its economy is permanently stuck in the doldrums, a global cautionary tale. And no wonder. Europeans enjoy August off, retire in their prime and spend more time eating and socialising with their families than inhabitants of any other region. Oddly, surveys show people in countries both rich and poor value such leisure time; somehow Europeans managed to squeeze their employers into giving them more of it. Even as they were depressing GDP by wasting time playing with their kids, the denizens of Europe also managed to keep inequality relatively low while it ballooned elsewhere in the past 20 years. Nobody in Europe has spent the past week looking at their stock portfolio, wondering if they could still afford to send their kids to university. Europeans have no idea what “medical bankruptcy” is. Oh, and no EU leader has ever launched their own cryptocurrency.
This whole paragraph had me on edge, a little unsure of whether The Economist, (edit for clarity: from presumably) an American publication (wing), legitimately thought these were good things or not.
an American publication
According to Wikipedia, its mostly written and edited in London, and was started in Britain in the 1800s (to raise support for abolishing import tariffs in fact)
I kind of got both that impression and its exact opposite, like the whole paragraph feels like a long wink and a nudge, like the author would like to say “maybe fixating on ‘line go up’ distracts you from all that is good in life” but that would negate The Economist’s entire raison d’être.
It’s like Schrodinger’s argument.
Already was. While the us was occupied with cosplaying as freedom freaks and destroying countless democracies for the sake of freedom, europe actually became free.
It’s a different idea of freedom. In the US it’s about freedom to X, in the EU it’s freedom from X.
For example, in the US you have the freedom to say just about anything you want. In the EU you’re free from people making you unsafe by misinformation, lies, etc. In the US you’re free to take pictures of anything you want that can be seen from the street. In Germany you’re free from having pictures of your property posted online without your consent. The result is that Google’s Street View covers everything in the US and almost nothing in Germany. In the US people or companies are free to take public information and hold onto it or publish it as they see fit without interference. In the EU, you’re free from having that information out there forever beyond your control. You’re free to demand that it be deleted under certain circumstances.
In the end, the European way is more about regulating things. It asks what kinds of things prevent people from living their lives freely and without worries, and tries to regulate those things. The American way is more about removing every regulation and rule possible and saying the end result is freedom so it must be good.
We really should unironically and systematicaly slap all the Yankee slogans about freedom and democracy and being a beacon and stuff on pictures of EU flags and photos of our parliaments etc.
It always was.
Always is a stretch. Lol
Depends on what you define as “Europe”. Soviet Russia, its satellite states and Franco Spain weren’t really more free than the USA, even while they were legally segregating races in the south. EU was definitely more free from the start, though.
Europe has had the ability to change one’s station in life - what people might equate to the “American Dream” - for a long time now, and has had it better than America has. You can go from poor to a middle class life more easily. However going from rags-to-riches is far more rare. Unfortunately, here in America we’ve equated the Dream and Freedom to mean going from middle class to Fuck You Money, having a personal arsenal, and breaking every social contract we possibly can. The only ones trotting out The American Dream ™️ as still existing are politicians and the people fighting any restrictions on getting richer while the rest of us are crabs in a bucket all stepping on each other trying to keep from drowning. Now, with trump, we have the basic Constitution under attack and what few freedoms that guaranteed we had left being eroded. Well, except 2A, but he’ll get to that eventually.
Yeah, Europe has absolutely been “free-er” and better in multiple ways for a long while now. The only reason most Americans don’t understand this is because guns and chasing fuck you money.
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Anglo leftists will be like: “No.” Because hatespeech and racism is only good when they do it. And many EU countries ban hatespeech.