profeatur
Joined 5 years ago
Joined 5 years ago
We have that here too, except in our case it’s the government using the good old fashioned medium of television.
The enlightenment era gave us two separate definitions of freedom. At its foundation, the US govt is granted whatever rights it has to constrain freedom by wholly autonomous and free individuals, and in the other (French, continental) conception freedom is both defined and granted by the state. Authoritarianism is baked into the definition.
It will take future historians living in more intellectually permissive times to give a full account as to why the first concept of freedom only ever took root in the US and why the majority of countries have adopted the second.
How does low pay affect the “liveability” of work conditions? A waitress in the US makes as much or more than a software engineer in most of the EU. While the EU worker may receive more vacation time, and while he certainly has better personal financial skills (poverty will do that to you), he has no path towards a better future. A blue collar American worker, in the (increasingly unlikely) event that he chooses to manage his money well, can end up wealthy. A European who isn’t born wealthy will never become wealthy.
>public healthcare
Which everyone avoids, if they can afford it. The private system is really good though.
>parental leave
Because of the cost and risk of employing someone in the EU, when an employee takes maternity leave it’s the other employees who end up having to do the missing employee’s work. This is especially true with small businesses.
>communist nightmare
Over-socialized neo-feudal peasants who embrace their own impoverishment because they’ve been convinced that they’re superior to everyone else is pretty dystopian.
In Europe, the average person has no recourse (or will) to take advantage of the wealth creation that’s taking place elsewhere. In fact people seem to think that the economy is a zero-sum game. Economic illiteracy reigns. The public healthcare system is not even good. Anyone who can afford to goes private, and if you have any kind of problem that’s not well-known (like SIBO) you will have to pay thousands of dollars out of pocket in order to heal yourself. Housing is far more expensive relative to wages. Taxes are far higher than anywhere else (the middle class pays the majority of the taxes in Europe). Most of the population subscribes to some form of “enlightened” atheist humanism or hedonism, but due to low fertility and immigration, the population will soon be replaced by Muslims. People go to visit and marvel at Cathedrals and other great works of their ancestors but then refuse to ask themselves why they’re incapable of making anything of such value today. It’s true that the high-speed rail is very convenient, but in the end its tourists who benefit most from this, and those tourists are increasingly foreign.
Meanwhile, many words are spilled over electronic media by overly-socialized Europeans and the corrupt elite who lord over them about how great Europe is compared to everywhere else. European cities top the “best in the world” lists while the native people who actually live here struggle to improve their lives.
How long will Europeans continue to delude themselves into believing the Reddit-view of the world?