If they changed that they'd perhaps become world powers themselves.
No, that's just the 2010s propaganda fed to you by people who assert that not letting them do whatever they want is "bureaucratic". These very same people are completely fine lobbying legislature for more moat when they benefit from it.
The difference between "middle democracies" or whatever that means and the US is just that politics aren't corrupted enough yet that they can buy whatever they want.
World Bank’s broad “Regulatory Quality” measure supports that direction: Sweden scored 95.28/100 and the US 90.57/100 in its latest comparable 2023 data. I couldn't find EU wide score.
I wanted to help someone to get work visa and I thought it is like Sweden and you just fill a small form, oh boy! We hired a lawyer for just filling the US side application.
But yes, Americans are told they have the freest speech and the freest markets, and don't seem to question either.
Yeah, an organized and powerful administration is the basis of rule-of-law system. The opposite isn't entrepreneurship, it's a state of widespread corruption where laws are toothless.
It doesn't benefit upstarts who want a fair environment to start a business, it benefits megacorps with their own militia of lawyers to bend the rules, and pockets deep enough to lobby for the removal of rules that can't be bent.
Think of AI copyright infringement. You know why the AI labs are in the USA and China and not in Europe.
Do you want your house blocked of by someone elses' wall. Do you want to be kept up all night by load industrial noises next to you?
Canada is corrupt as hell, just no one cares so it doesn't make international news.
Edit:
Oh yeah, forgot about the SNC-Lavalin debacle, where the ruling government tried to make the legal problems of their corporate buddies go away[4] by sneaking a new "slap on the wrist" law into an annual budget bill and then pressuring the prosecutor to apply it.
[1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/mckinsey-immigration-consul...
[2] https://thewalrus.ca/shadow-government/
[3] https://www.pm.gc.ca/en/news/news-releases/2026/08/31/prime-...
So is Europe. It's just not at the point the US reached, yet.
When your examples of Canada being "corrupt as hell" are such chickenshit nonsense, it betrays that you're just a partisan zealot that has literally zero sense of scale or reason.
McKinsey, a massive consulting firm, had a whole $32M in business with the government? Holy shit, basically the deep state! Sounds like the globalist infiltrated the government!
The SNC thing was embarrassing, but it was over its behaviour overseas (Libya, to be precise, where a dictator's family got wined and dined), and the government was concerned about a massive, major Canadian firm being crippled by domestic hand wringing.
When that is what you have to offer up for Canada being "corrupt as hell", in comparison to criminal shitholes like the US (which you think is much better, as you've explained elsewhere), wow. Back to shitty subreddits where your tiny group of laughable farces have your discussions about how dire things are.
I say it with absolute conviction that I desperately want every "Canada is broken" jackal like you to pack up and move South of the border.
That's unfettered capitalism at work—"free" implies no bounds. Multinational corporations have never been more powerful now than at anytime in history.
No bounds for whom?
Your implied premise is that private companies cannot impede others' freedom, which isn't true. In unfettered capitalism, only the largest corporations have the power and money to be free.
It is odious to start a company in the EU. There are many accounts of this on HN itself.
This is false.
> There are many accounts of this on HN itself.
Yes, I saw one just recently where the poster made obviously false statements about starting a company in Germany.
(Before you downvote this comment, please note that I have started multiple companies in the EU. I'm speaking from personal experience, not from something I've read on Hacker News.)
If they were to change some within the citizenry would stand to gain at the expense of others. Inequality would increase.
Seems—for now—middle democracies aren't prepared to pay the high price of social upheaval such a policy would create.
When people go on about a Golden Age, I'm the awkward one who asks "Golden for who exactly?"
European sentiment is totally out of touch with European reality. They'll post gleefully online about how much better their life is and then go back to their sardine flat where they can't afford to pay for heating, and it never ever occurs to them to reconsider any priors. They'll huff copium on Reddit about how bad American healthcare is, while waiting for years for desperately needed surgeries, paying far more for healthcare by way of taxes than any American does.
Are their ideas out of touch? No, it's reality that's wrong.
This is blatantly false. Americans spend 18% of GDP on healthcare, while most European countries are around 10%.