More like the top ~35%, but it's taboo to talk about that.

Many examples of when this is not seemingly the goal, hence the "usually". Some people suck, everywhere, and sometimes they end up with power to enact things, this happens everywhere, Europe is probably no better. Hopefully the institutions we've built up and continue to build, are more resilient when the future real tests come though, so far they haven't really been put under real stress.

The goal isn't "making it difficult to start a business", the goal is to protect people, meaning things affecting the public are more controlled, slower and more bureaucratic to initiate. The slowness is a feature and there really isn't any "difficulty" in starting a business, it just takes time to fill out papers and wait for approvals and what not.

It's very simple to start a business, and it's even simpler to hire people.

It is hard to fire employee, especially when the company is doing good, yes.

It is a bit slow and administratively annoying to start a business in some countries, yes, though in those you can usually start operating while starting AND there are workarounds which is why there isn't enough pressure to stop it (eg, the german "pre made company shell" market is how you actually do it instead of making your own).

What regulations specifically do you find make it hard for you to start a business or hire people?

Go live a few months as an average middle class person in Western Europe and then do the same in the US. You can argue in favor of US superiority based on GDP and stock market and number of billionaires a hundred other similar metrics, but looking at basic happiness and quality of life there’s really no comparison. Europeans value maximizing family, community, physical and mental health, leisure time, hobbies, culture, and so their laws and policies are written in that way.

Yeh all I wanna do I hire a few employees, raise some capital and put my AI nudifier out into the hands of German schoolkids, but damn EU regulators just wants to keep the little guy down I guess

Yep. Growing up, I always defaulted to the "enlightened centrist" perspective that antitrust law and IP law and trade law were failing to help the median person simply due to the difficulty of the problem, that insofar as our regulation was inadequate it was inadequate because it had to balance multiple crossed incentives and stay ahead of world class sprinters who had a systemic resource advantage because the economy will always be larger than the regulators. But the more I learn about the history of these subjects the more I realize that the levers were understood, they did work, and that the present outcomes were entirely intentional.

Reagan and the Chicago school intentionally shifted antitrust and IP law into monopoly mode (Bork and Bowman+Posner). The Consumer Welfare Standard is an obvious fig-leaf over Robber Baron talking points as defeated earlier by Brandeis, the Nine No-Nos (lol) indicate that the failure modes of modern IP policy weren't just understood but contained, and then containment was turned off. Trade is a messier story but Triffin articulated the distributional problems in the 60s so nobody gets to claim ignorance.

The bad news is that there is more corruption that I thought, but the good news is that the problems are more solvable than I thought.