I'd rather live in a society with strong labor protections than one that is "more innovative", whatever that means.
Because then the question arises: What if the current way of handling labor protection in the EU (as one of many components) leads to destroying yours and everyone elses standard of living, simply because it's unaffordable? Would you still argue that this is the way to go? Everyone going down with the ship together?
I don't know what will happen and what the root causes are (labor laws might not contribute much to the picture, I really don't know), but at least we should be somewhat cognizant of the fact, where the industries of the future are currently built and where they are not, and have a fantastic explanation of why this is not going to be a super big issue.
It's quite an assumption that it's unaffordable. In the last decades efficiency has been only increasing, but working hours per week aren't significantly going down nor are the salaries noticeably higher.
Where does all the extra efficiency go to? It's pretty ok in my book if it goes to social security.
I am sure there are ways to try and force companies, but I would suspect it's fairly complicated politically, given that that's usually not how that goes.
The EU single market isn't really single yet - and that is in my views the biggest obstacle to innovating start-ups being able to scale. If you want to release EU-wide you have to make sure you also comply to 27 national jurisdictions. It's hard. I work at financial services, and we really have to carefully grow and release per country. The UK would have been nice, but being even more different, for the company of our size they are a total no-go.
But I do think it works. The European countries with strong workers' protection are very attractive destination for knowledge immigration, they make a good chunk of top-10 in Human Development Index, and the whole of top-10 if you adjust it by inequality (so if you look at median at not an average).
> I am sure there are ways to try and force companies, but I would suspect it's fairly complicated politically
Less complicated in the EU than basically anywhere else in the world.
Oh, the idea was not that the EU couldn't compel companies to do things. They can. It's that companies can then go and move production somewhere else in the world. As they do.
Through innovation.
done by the workforce. The financial benefits of worker innovation flow upwards, first to shareholders then to executives. Whatever is left over is claimed by expenses, modernization and as low a wage as can be engineered.
As opposed to what has happened in the US, where everything is happy and everything is affordable. Innovation!
Me + USA = starkly unaffordable. Rents here have ~doubled in 6yrs and are up 5-fold from 2000. Wages grow at a much slower pace - insuring the gap between wages and expenses grows continually.
In fact, where industries are built is even more granular: Shenzen and the Bay Area. Even within the US, big cities have tried building their own tech hubs, and failed. Economic policy may have played a minor role in building NYC or SFO.
Somebody is paying that price. If it's companies they are disincentivized to employ people in your market. If companies go somewhere else to employ people, jobs disappear from your market. If the jobs disappear, so does the money.
Labor protection does not "cost money". It is a limit on the degree to which workers can be exploited.
Correct, at the time it was about a 50% increase. However, given my food & shelter costs it would have ended up being more expensive for me to live in California.
The post I replied to was about high levels of taxation, which exist in the US also (the treatment of capital gains would have been much more favourable to me).
>If companies go somewhere else to employ people, jobs disappear from your market.
Does this actually happen anywhere in the usual suspect countries? Doesn't seem to be. Quite the opposite -- they all import workers, because the actual pain point right now is pension fund deficit with the ration of retired to working being skewed.
This is the result of relying too much on politics. If parents where to ask their children to pay for their expensive retirement benefits directly, most who tell them to fuck off, rightfully so. But since politicians have placed a level of indirection in between, it's not the responsibility of anyone yet everyone pays for it.
Socialist systems have a way of self-destructing after a while because nobody ends up being accountable for anything. Currently the politicians are good scapegoats but really the people who put those politicians in place bear as much responsibility.
If it had been about their own money, things wouldn't have turned out this way. Funnily enough since most people don't trust governments that much, they have double dipped, saving on top of retirement benefits and "investing" in real estate that they now rent at a high price to their children. This has created an obscenely well-off generation, that is now voting for immigration in order to keep their obscene retirement benefits, furthermore fucking their children.
The GDP/capita of e.g. France is 10x what it was in the 1970s. There is nothing "unaffordable" about the European social safety net, except that there are political pressures to dismantle it (right-liberals like the Economist)
Your overall point might still be correct though.
spotted the capitalist.
Explicit taxes are better than implicit taxes. Forcing companies to provide social services such as employment guarantees or health insurance to employees makes taxes look lower than they actually are.
The only good thing coming out of both Trump's terms is the diminishing influence of the US, I can see your point on how US money could influence politics here but at the same time it's also now much harder for that influence to take hold properly. US influence was much stronger back in the late 90s, early 00s, it's been waning since 9/11, and kinda reaching a tipping point with Trump.
The next financial implosion, which is inevitable in the boom-bust cycles, can likely cement this diminished influence, the US won't have that much extra money sloshing around to fuck with other countries, they are losing long-time allies which propped them up to recover from the 2008 mess they created. It'll probably be the best time to decouple away from the US, including their financial influence in our politics.