All these regulations just trying to keep those damn disruptors at bay. Innovation is forbidden here. But hey! It’s for our own good.
Yeah, this. Europe is an old continent that's mostly old money. The Europeans of today are rich mostly due to inherited wealth and former imperialism, not wealth they created themselves through innovation, with some families tracing their wealth back for centuries when land was cheap and plentiful and taxes were next to nothing that any hardworking person could buy land and build a business and while the wealth didn't go stratospheric, it still multiplied handsomely for their successors since "time in the market beats timing the market".
If you look at Europe's biggest and wealthiest companies, most of them are several decades if not centuries old with some of their major shareholders still being old European nobility, in contrast to the US where the top tech companies are at most 30 years old, with older ones that fail to innovate always dying in a healthy cycle (IBM, Sun, Oracle, SGI, etc.), leaving room for new players(FAANG) to come on the market and eat the lunch of the dinosaurs. While in Europe, with so much of the pie taken by the old players, there's no more room for new players to spring up since the old established ones pulled the ladder up after them.
The image of the typical wealthy successful German is not that of a hip 20-30 year old who built some cool business in his dorm room or his parents' garage like in the US, but of a 40 year old man with a Porsche who inherited his dad's machine shop and rolodex(typical owner of the famous Mittelstand that's always revered here on HN).
All this old wealth is very risk adverse and feels threatened by disruptions and will fight tooth and nail to keep their status quo.
Just take one of these comfy government jobs we’re providing and you’ll be fine. We'll even take care of your pension and give you "free" health care.