Comment by abc123abc123
1 year ago
Europe is dying. It is an old socialist relic, with a completely outdated model of reality. The successes of the extreme left and right shows that the political nobility are done.
Sadly europe never realized that low taxes, capitalism and liberty is what drives wealth.
I wonder if, in a generation, when the best brains moved to the US, asia and argentina, the continent will finally awake from its socialist slumber?
Hong Kong managed to go from a peasant village to a global financial center in a generation or two. In theory, it should be possible for europe to do the same. But in order for that to happen, there needs to be insight into the sickness, and awareness of the cure.
I'm happy I left. After I left high tax western europe I basically doubled my salary after tax! =)
Spain is flooded with Argentinians fleeing. Spain, which isn't even that good. Europe is still a much better place to live to the common people than anywhere else in the world.
If you look for one, you can always find a worse place to live on the planet than your own, if you wanna make yourself feel better about where you live, however that's no excuse to be complacent and ignore the real issues your own place is facing. That's called coping.
I want my country every year to be just a little better than it was the year before. If that's not happening and I need to resort to comparisons to failed developing countries to see it in a good light, then something is going wrong with it.
HK was a special case of being an intermediary port city. Same with Singapore. The European equivalents are Luxembourg and Monaco.
Also HK and Singapore are intermediary port cities that made those general shifts by adopting policies inspired by Europe, in the former case whilst still being the territory of a European power...
Things are a lot easier if you are basically controlling a river delta (of a river with an absolutely huge hinterland).
Same for the Dutch, btw.
> Sadly europe never realized that low taxes, capitalism and liberty is what drives wealth.
Honestly we have moved Europe so far past the post-political that I find it difficult to comprehend peoples politics nowadays. I wonder what people think "socialism" or "left" politics is now that everything has been so thoroughly depoliticized, I genuinely don't know. Is the EU "left"? I guess so? Is the IMF?
You can just look at the numbers. Percentage of GDP that is driven by government spending:
China: 33%
USA: 34%
Germany: 50%
Economically, modern Europe is more communist and exerts more centralized control than China. Might explain why the current class of European elites have presided over the greatest destruction of an industrial base since the Soviet Union.
This is fascinating, do you think then the US (under Biden) is/was more communist (economically) than China is?
By the Overton window of America, I think much of Western Europe is somewhere between "extreme left wing" and blank stares of non-comprehension at the still-present literal Soviet memorials that were never removed when the literal USSR fell.
By the Overton window of Europe, I think the Democrats are "dangerously right wing, look at them being pro-gun". Certainly they are to the right of my personal Overton window, though perhaps I am projecting my own views on my fellow Europeans.
Republicans of faint heart should avoid finding out how Trump gets labelled on newspaper front pages around here.