Comment by a_humean
4 months ago
Yeah, the whole concept of rights in the US are, in the main, about restricting what the federal government and states can do individuals.
Whereas in Europe our concept of rights include restrictions on the state, but also also might restrict non-state actors. We also have a broader concept of rights that create obligations on the state and private actors to do things for individuals to their benefit.
It’s kinda good the planet gets to run both experiments, and more.
The EU approach seems to want to insert government in to contracts between private individual and those they do business with, and the US approach seems to want to maybe allow too much power to accumulate in those who wield the mercantile powers.
The optimal approach probably lies in the tension between multiple loci.
It's one experiment because both systems are competing at the same time for global resources both in cooperation and competition with each other and other actors. Additional both systems exist in such widely different contexts that any comparison would be inaccurate because other factors such as geographic and historical have a large impact on any measured results.
The US approach is more than that, for instance if every employee in a business pushes for a contract that says workers will negotiate as a block and pay new union dues, and the contract says new hires will be bound by that too, that's illegal in many states. Not just the normal "right-to-work" restrictions, the contract isn't valid even if unanimously agreed on by every current employee (union security agreements). But for shareholders they all set it up like that, with votes weighted by dollars. A new shareholder can't buy someone's shares and government says it's illegal for him to be bound by the voting structure.
And secondary strikes are also illegal in the US under Taft-Hartley.
The optimal approach appears domain specific and granular, too.
As for domain specificity:
I don't know any Europeans who'd prefer to have American healthcare.
I don't know any European technology companies that hold a candle to the sheer breadth and depth of capabilities brought into the world by Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Nvidia, AMD, Intel, OpenAI, or Anthropic.
Yes, Mistral, Nokia, OVH, and SAP exist, but compared to the alternarives, they exist in the way the American healthcare system exists compared to its alternatives.
As for granularity:
Perhaps we want American style governance for building the tech, but then European style governance for running it?
The American model of governance was created for a world with very distant nation-state threats but a large number of colonial threats, which is why it's centered around "every man for themselves" (in spite of FDR's best efforts). On the contrary, European governance was basically developed during the Revolutionary Wave, which was sweeping all across Europe, that monarchies found that the only way to appease the people was to give into their reforms - and often rapidly because of the domino effects of revolutions. In other words, American governance was built from the ground up, while European governance had to be adjusted within the existing environment and monarchical government frameworks.
In fact, European governments weren't even well-defined in their current state up until the end of WW2, in spite of how much Europeans like to take potshots against USA for being a "young" nation.
This does make the American form great for working with uncharted territory (how to handle new tech, how to exploit the earth in new ways, etc.) while the European form is more reactionary (how do we keep the people appeased, how do we provide a better standard of living, how do we alleviate hardship).
Perhaps the ideal mix of the two, between the frontier-style governance and European-style reactionism, like the Swiss model.
> I don't know any Europeans who'd prefer to have American healthcare.
Selfishly I think my American healthcare is better than anything I ever had in the UK. I can see a doctor within 2 weeks even a specialist, I can actually get a sleep study, my doctor will actually listen to me rather than tell me I'm just getting old, go home and take an ibuprofen.
17 replies →
> I don't know any Europeans who'd prefer to have American healthcare.
Probably depends a lot on where you are in Europe. Some countries have long waiting lists for surgeries (life saving ones) and access to doctors is very limited (too few, months to get an appointment) so it sucks as well if you are in such a situation
1 reply →
>I don't know any Europeans who'd prefer to have American healthcare.
Some 50-100k Europeans fly to the US to get American healthcare every year.
13 replies →
I don’t want to rain on your parade, but you would be more fair by replacing these companies with VCs, because they’re the ones lifting real weight here.
[dead]
That's because in the US we don't give non-state organization power over other people. At least not in the European way where you have to give your life to an org. A US citizen has the freedom to disassociate with any organization at any time for any reason.
Of course this comes with a social cost, offset as this allows people who are discontent with their arrangements to forge a new path States like California have high job lock, so most innovation comes from side-projects as people checkout from work.
> That's because in the US we don't give non-state organization power over other people.
How are credit ratings maintained again?
> At least not in the European way where you have to give your life to an org.
I have to what!? News to me.
> A US citizen has the freedom to disassociate with any organization at any time for any reason.
Maybe, but the EU is more militant in enforcing that right. Some US states are working on "right to be forgotten" laws, but they've got a lot of catching up to do, and I don't think there's a federal law in the works yet.
> That's because in the US we don't give non-state organization power over other people
Have you been following the news for the last few years?
>in the US we don't give non-state organization power over other people.
False.
What are you on about?
[dead]
What restrictions do European governments impose on the state?
[dead]
[dead]
I don't agree with that at all. If anyone else tries to infringe your rights it's either voluntary i.e. you've consented to this, or it's involuntary in which case you can sue them or the state will prosecute them on your behalf.
What you’re missing is that the set of rights European countries recognize and the set of rights that the American government recognizes are not the same set.
In Europe they recognize a right to be forgotten that simply does not exist in the US. Europe recognizes personal data rights that the US does not. These data rights impose requirements on the way companies manage your data and specifically do not allow, e.g., Facebook to get you to consent that your rights do not apply. The European government protects imposes citizens’ rights on businesses in several ways that the US government does not.
On the other hand, US free speech rights are generally stronger. And of course no one else except US citizens have an inalienable right to sleep on a bed made of loaded handguns.
Obviously the rights that the state grants are different in the US than Europe, but the rights of individuals are protected versus other individuals, corporations, and general organisations; just as they are in all civilised countries. To the extent you can have famous cases where people sue large coffee franchises for selling coffee that's too hot.
So the statement that "the whole concept of rights in the US are, in the main, about restricting what the federal government and states can do individuals" is far from reality, and I felt it necessary to ground this conversation back in reality.
1 reply →
Unfortunately, the world contains nuance that your statement does not.
What I said is a very general statement that broadly applies to all civilised countries, reiterated because the parent comment was very incorrect suggesting that rights are mainly protecting citizens from their state in the US. It's simply not true.
It is oddly funny that people in my town are ferociously protesting the police force's adoption of Flock surveillance cameras when everyone already carries total surveillance devices (smartphones) on their person at all times.
You can (generally) tell when a person around you is filming, and you generally don’t have to worry about tons of random individuals bringing together footage of you for tracking and surveillance.
Private individuals generally aren't systematically using their cameras for mass surveillance of you. The government is.
> The government is.
Companies too.
1 reply →
Most of the cameras are attached to either Apple or Android devices. The companies that control these ecosystems could use them for mass surveillance. The government could 'politely' ask these companies to do that for them. Or they could just directly order the phones.
6 replies →
In Germany it's (very roughly speaking) illegal to film people in public. (Importantly, not the same as filming a thing or event and having people incidentally in the frame)
[flagged]
I can leave my phone at home. I cannot leave flock at home. It’s about consent.
I'm pretty sure the point parent was trying to make is that you can't get other people to leave their phones at home and there is very little recourse if a private citizen decides to record you without your consent from their phone in a public space. There's of course a difference in the powers involved, but people have had their lives ruined because somebody captured a video of them out of context or in their worst moment.