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European societies are the most truly democratic states there have ever been. You have educated populaces making decisions with full information (comparatively more than anywhere else in the world, ever) to choose your leaders. All your policy decisions - generous state pensions and benefits, redistributive taxes, extreme bureaucracy around hiring and firing, stifling operational and capital markets regulations - are chosen by your societies at the ballot box.

look at the massive popular protests when Macron tried to do pension reform. These are completely legitimate choices to make, they're your countries, but i do not think it's your leaders letting you down.

For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. - H. L. Mencken

The sad thing about democratic societies it is difficult to form a consensus on anything. So elections are won on either emotions or the minimally contentious manifesto. Each successive win on such a manifesto further lowers what will achieve consensus.

People will mesmerizing oratory skills are extremely rare. That such individuals choose politics as their career and then come up with appealing messaging at the right time is almost like solving 3-body problem.

> about democratic societies

You imply representative democracy, where political parties are forced to be formed not to solve issues, but to win a popular vote. To win the vote, you have to dilute your policy enough to encompass the masses by providing many common denominators. There, consensus is impossible by design, we no longer live in a Greek metropolis, where the dimensionality of problems is low. Todays societies are complex and have many dimensions, yet the representative democracies group all of the similar and dissimilar issues under 2-3-4-5 different parties.

I see exactly two (one) solutions:

- people go beyond party boundaries and cooperate on issues they feel important (doesn't work, it's already possible on paper, but in the best case this ability is traded for negotiational power)

- direct voting on issues, parties only serve a directional and educational role

> Macron tried to do pension reform > they're your countries, but i do not think it's your leaders letting you down.

What fanfic am I reading here? The protests had no impact on the course of the pension reform.

they did not manage to stop the law. what i am saying is that the leaders were trying to pass a necessary law and the population was against it, so you can't pass off blame for the dysfunction on them

I see. Agreed.

I don't think the issue is the lack of good leadership.

Europe, and particularly the EU, is effectively governed by people who think like administrators. In politics, in business, and in the actual administration. On some level, this is a good thing. The core republican principle is that leaders should be disposable servants, because actual leaders never have the public's best interests in mind. Except maybe temporarily or by accident.

The problem is that administrators tend to propose administrative solutions to the issues they have identified. Because they think like administrators. Sometimes this works, and sometimes it doesn't. Most successes and failures of the EU can be traced back to this tendency to enact administrative solutions. There would be more successes and fewer failures if the administrators could somehow learn to predict when an administrative solution is not the right tool.

Housing markets, labor markets, and pension systems are regional, and the situation in each region is different. Capital markets are also regional to some extent, but perhaps they shouldn't be. Pay is a matter of perspective. You can say that Europeans lack well-paying jobs, or you can say that American middle class wages are low (relative to the wealth of the society), because their upper middle class wages are high.

> The decisions taken by leadership ... are rarely in the best interest of Europeans

...and you offer America as a counterpoint? A nation predicated on fucking its people over? A hellscape of vulture capitalists, wreckers with MBAs, capricious firings, regulatory capture, poisoned water, political graft, televangelists with rolexes, police killing citizens for sport, judges getting kickbacks from prisons? And, right at the top, Mr Zero Sum himself, a man who destroyed as many public institutions as quickly as he could but somehow increased the national debt by 25% in two years.

That America? Makes decisions for the benefit of Americans, you think?

You have a point about government roadblocks - I could tell you stories about petty officialdom in rural Spain. But, unlike you, I've been to the American deep south. No, you do not have prospects there. Fucking Latvia is more advanced than most American states. Go to Lubbock and tell me europe is "behind". You've fallen for the American myth.

America has many merits, and would have become a regional power even without the fall of European empires, but please be informed: America's place in the world today comes from being the last one standing after two wars.

Re leadership: none of my smart friends wants to be politician. Maybe that’s the root cause.

You are right. European civil society does not reward initiative and so its political class chooses to mislead than bring clarity. Work is not rewarded.

From recent events, I like giving example of Deutschland Ticket. The German transport minister during 2020/2021 took a huge political risk of challenging existing system, made life much more easier for normal person. What happened to his political career? The guy is nowhere to be seen.

> Europe is behind because we do not have good leadership. The decisions taken by leadership, no matter what level you look at - local, company, national, supranational - are rarely in the best interest of Europeans. Our markets - housing, rental, labor, capital, pension - are broken and therefore the population does not find opportunities to express their talent completely and the more motivated migrate. Europeans lack well-paying jobs and pay is low because pay is not transparent.

Sounds like Europe is behind because Europeans are working less and taking more vacations. You just point to poor leadership as the cause.

Seems you came with a preconceived opinion. Know that working harder does not pay in Europe. So people do not. The incentives are not aligned. Leaders design incentives, not normal people.

The best way to understand European policy is that at a high level they want to establish a quota system both within Europe and globally.

The problem with creating a quota system is that you have to be able to punish countries who cheat on the quota. Europe doesn't have the capacity to do this except internally. The regulatory superpower idea only really makes sense with the physical power to compel obedience and extract taxes.

In the US we solved these issues like the bankruptcy code with federal law because the federal government is the supreme physical power on the continent that all the states obey for reasons of self-preservation and because they are bribed to obey. US federal transfers to individual states are also much, much larger than the largest EU transfers to member stats and the EU is not a central military or police power either.

This is why the EU member states (and the UK member states as well) should become US territories so that they can benefit from federal law without necessarily destabilizing domestic US politics. They are already dependent on US military power but they do not receive the full benefits of becoming member territories.

Why are you arguing for EU member states to become US territories instead of EU states just federalizing?

> This is why the EU member states (and the UK member states as well) should become US territories so that they can benefit from federal law without necessarily destabilizing domestic US politics

This is a very strange suggestion. The US federal government is not a beacon of best governance. And especially now with Trump, there won't be any takers for this.

It's certainly an untenable idea, and while I'd agree that the US isn't the best beacon of governance today, I'd also argue that the EU as a whole has not been either and most of the problems are obscured from English-speaking Americans because we don't have the time or language capacity to understand all of the nuance and problems for each member state. It's hard to understand.

On the other hand, the US is big time. We're always on the front page, and so Europeans of course begin to believe they know a lot about American politics and thoughts because they read about it all the time. That leads to outlandish understandings and expectations of the US and so even when you want to start looking at governance comparisons it's hard to have conversations because "defenders" of American systems don't know enough about the EU and European "defenders" of the EU think they know quite a bit about American politics. This leads to a lot of misunderstandings, unfortunately.

The reality is that both systems have pros and cons, and how good each system is really depends on individual circumstances, and even then those circumstances and pros/cons change over time.

To keep the fun part of the conversation going, I actually think the United States and the rest of the Anglosphere should join together in one bloc. Sometimes I fantasize about how different and perhaps better history would have turned out had the American Revolution not happened.

Federalism is a strength not a weakness. This desire for control at highest levels is what made WW2 horrors acceptable.

Our problem is incoherence and slow reaction to reality. We either often not experiment or avoid replicating a success. We lack agility in our rule making.

AI was already better than this in 2020 when your account was created. You must be human, you've failed a turing test.

G7 nations aspiring to be Puerto Rico - lol.