Comment by gordian-mind
18 hours ago
The term neoliberalism has no meaning, it's purely used in a pejorative way by leftists. If you want to talk about world markets, just say world markets. Or "free market", but it has free in it so it makes the effect less powerful.
Also, the reason the EU does not have that many tech companies is not global competition; it's that it takes 6 months to hire someone, you cannot fire them ever, and nations tax you based on your unrealized valuation because they don't really believe you should be running things on your own.
I'll fully grant that the vast majority of the time when I use the word neoliberal, it is indeed derisively. Doesn't change that this is, again, simply an observation that names the thing. Markets, localized or world, free or not, do not function in vacuums. They are shaped by ideologies, including that of the neoliberal school of thought.
It's frankly far more derisive of me and any reader really to say that because "free market" has the word "free" in it that the majority of people will cosign it happily with no further thought. Do you also think the DPRK is a democracy because it says so?
The EU has a large menagerie of businesses, successful and otherwise. If hiring friction and tax policy were the whole story, you'd expect the EU to lag in all capital-intensive industries, not just have a specific gap in hyperscale tech, which is the one sector most directly shaped by network effects and first-mover advantage from a market that let a handful of US firms scale first.
Additionally I'd push back on the premise that "doesn't produce hyperscalers" is even a mark against a system in the first place. They're what you get after competition has mostly finished collapsing into a handful of winners who then run the supposedly free market. Funny how the same people who'll lecture you for an hour about the sacred competitive forces of the free market go quiet the second vertical integration and monopoly-adjacent scale start choking those forces out.