Comment by ufmace

Yes, I suppose it is a deep cultural difference.

My opinion on unions is mixed, I suppose. They may be necessary in some times, places, and industries to compel reasonable treatment of workers. If such things are necessary, they're probably better than government intervention due to being much closer to the actual workplace. Historically, they have been responsible for establishing some good practices as standard in the American workforce. But they also have their bad sides. They tend to encourage an excessively antagonistic relationship between workers and management, cause pay and promotions to depend only on seniority rather than skill and work ethic, make it impractical to terminate workers who are ridiculously lazy or toxic, force everyone to take the same benefits whether they want them or not, enforce ridiculous rules about who can do what when, and other such things. They probably deserve at least some of the blame for the fall from grace of American automobile manufacturing due to things like being unwilling to accept greater factory automation even if it may lead to fewer workers needed, thus making the whole company less competitive.

I suppose in my ideal economy, I'd expect around 10-30% unionization, with the rest of the workers treated reasonably well due to a combination of market forces and threat of unionization. That's decently close to what we have in the US right now.

I do find advocates of it in the US to be ridiculous at times. Like, okay maybe unions are necessary and beneficial sometimes, but I think software engineering is about the least in need of unionization of any career in the modern world. But still some people seem to be obsessed with the idea of it.

Anti-monopoly regulation seems to be a mixed bag to me too, particularly in today's economy. Only 20-25 years ago, Microsoft was the big bad monster company, enough so that the US Government did start to look at using monopoly regulation against them a little bit. But the internet world and Google took the wind out of their sails better and faster than the Government could, and I think the tech world is better for it. FANG occupy similar economic space now, and I think it's likely that changing technology and market forces will again do a better job of knocking them back down a peg than the Government would.

Europe certainly doesn't lack smart and ambitious people, but I think those attitudes of who is allowed to be "on top" in society and what a good company looks like holds them back. That's a legitimate tradeoff that the people of Europe are free to make of course, but I disagree that it's the ideal way to organize a society.