Comment by adventured

The US didn't privatize everything: it was largely private to begin with. The US had a near laissez-faire economy until the WW1-WW2 era. The 1850 to 1910 era is incredibly devoid of government regulations on the economy, which was of course undergoing a gigantic industrial expansion. European states were not formed in any manner similar to the US. The modern European nation was largely constructed in the post WW1 and post WW2 environment, they were heavily remade by the wars and what came after, including their social welfare structures and their various private/public ownership models. If you go back and look at the governing structures of most any of the European powers prior to WW2, they were nearly all: kingdoms or fascist. The US is floating on centuries of continually accumulating cruft, whereas most of the European nations have had hard break points where they reset the board and started fresh.