The New World Economic Order

^ It wasn't businessmen who mandated six weeks vacation per year and a 35 hour workweek and a near complete inability to legally terminate workers in France. It was the socialists in government.

It wasn't businessmen who decided to give the world out in handouts and then head down the road to default. That was Italy and Greece.

I could go on, but you get the idea. The businessmen are at the mercy of the regulators there, not the instigators of the crystallization and stratification of Europe's economy.

A shorter work week and larger minimum wage are conducive to getting more people employed on a living wage, thus increasing demand, etc., etc.

I do find France's standards of hiring and firing to be rather ridiculous, however.

No

It was buisnessmen evading taxes because they could that caused those two countries to default

@ My God

Well, I think Greece is a poor example. Government corruption was on the scale of several percent of national GDP, with them lying about upwards to 5% of their GDP growth (simply didn't exist, US financial firms cook the books for them for bribes). They had extremely low taxation while trying to fund a pension fund and other socialist schemes. That failed.

However, that situation does not exist anywhere else. I'm not sure about this calcified business structure I keep hearing about. The Northern Economies are "boring" banking institutions, but so is Canada and that's what won out in the subprime mortgage scheme. The point is that doing the boring, non-exciting but slow-growth model, is perfectly reasonable. The USA goes into a bust mode, historically, around every 10 years. If you look back in history, USA experiences growth that exceeds the European average followed by a horrendous bust (and lots of talk about the "end of America") about every 10 years, leaving USA with basically no different economic standing than Europe.

However, the fundamentals of central Europe I think are actually far better. Certainly, USA has immigration going for it, which is really powerful but the immigration rate has dropped off considerably since Bush. The US grants around half a million (I forget how many exactly) green cards a year. That's much less than Canada who accepts 300 000 a year at 1/10th the population. And the immigration rate is expected to drop. The only saving grace for this would be free movement of labour under a NAFTA 2.0, but that's something of a, I'll believe it when I see it type of event.

Anyway, about the fundamentals.

• Health: much better. Healthy workers, higher productivity. You can see that socialism doesn't affect this (Don't worry, I'm not saying you were arguing against this, I just want to pre-empt others), where Sweden's productivity is also extremely high.
• Education: Much better. Far cheaper tuition fees (or free in many cases) with a high rate of post-secondary education. People simply being educated is value add to life.
• Wealth Disparity: In most cases, the wealth disparity is much better in Europe than USA.
• Median Household income: In many cases, though not all, the median household income is very good compared to USA

I'm not really seeing much evidence of "calcification". The industries that currently exist in Europe are doing well, especially Germany. So what is the argument exactly (because I'd like to hear) on this "dogma"? If an industry is doing well, why would you switch it? Is there a contention that they aren't spending enough for future economic development? Because if that's the case, I really don't see how USA is doing that either.

I can understand the argument that USA will be relevant basically forever because it's gigantic and full of resources/people, but that's really about it. That's similar to China really. The place was always relevant no matter what.