However, said corporate interests seem to have allowed a great deal of anti-corporate legislation to be passed, protecting whole swathes of Europeans from avaricious practices which are perfectly legal in the US.
Britain is leaving the EU
- Thread starter Cheetah
- Start date
^It can afford to, with literally trillions of dollars being on the line in case of dissolution. Yet it is no longer working as a protector of people; you'd be hard-pressed to argue so with what has been going on with austerity.
Right now, right now, ‘we're not as bad as the US’ is no longer a valid defence.
There is a big difference between Continental Europe corporate and Wall Street corporate.
The captains of industry that made in the early 80ies, when Europe was suffering from a bad economy, also not knowing how to react on the cheap Asian products, a plea for 1 market / 1 currency / 1 set of production regulation.
They were coming, in their mindset, from the owner based company culture and the Rhineland model, based in countries where the "Rechtsstaat" was implemented.
The Rechtsstaat being a kind of constitutional state, but compared to for example the USA form, much less Darwinistic and much more moral/ethical based.
The Rechtsstaat principle was developed by Immanuel Kant, a rationalistic philosopher, befitting the Enlightenment, and the basic idea was to protect the citizen against the power of the state and the people in power.
My guess is that where Voltaire, Kant, the French Revolution attacked the church as institution, they replaced the compassion of that religion with a rationalistic approach to help the poor and the weak.
With citoyen Napoleon (his original title !) and the Civil Code upgraded in continental Europe, there came a distinct difference in the relation citizen<->state compared to UK and USA.
Those captains of industry were not comparable to the current mainstream CEO's leading global corporate business. They would be fired as softies.
My 2 cents
and the Wikipedia on Rechtsstaat, still to superficial for such a fundamental principle in many (older) democracies, is a good intro.
Yeeesss. I never claimed that defence.
Verbose
Deity
They seem fair enough.
Another difference is that capital in Europe has developed in a situation of a necessity to manage scarcity. The more "darwinian" US model didn't. The underlying US assumption tends to be that resources are pretty much endless, and — possibly more importantly, so is labour.
The European political leaders and "captains of industry" in the 19th c. came up against a double challenge of politics (revolutions, the major vawes of 1789, 1830, 1848 — and how to avoid this trend to continue), and the need to actually husband, and actively improve, the labour force it could draw on. Nowhere more pronounced than in second-half of the 19th c. France, which had to attract foreign labour in order to just maintain its pool of workers.
Things like the formula 8 hours of work, 8 hours of sleep, 8 hours of leisure, wasn't implemented on wholly altruistic terms — it was actually underpinned with serious physiological research (Angelo Mosso et al.) in the 19th c. And the objective wasn't to be "nice" to workers, but a realisations that rest and recuperation were essential to not wear a limited work-force out, and allow it to operate at a maximum rate of efficiency that would be SUSTAINABLE pretty much indefinitely.
Add government funded one-payer public health systems to the mix, and we pretty much get the modern European situation. But not the US one. The UK would seem to fall somewhere in between. And "neoliberal economics" has been making inroads into continental Europe since the 1980's, because looked at in some ways the US/UK models seem(ed) to be working.
The very general pattern of what the modern states does — and ends up having expectations to meet from its citizens — is 1) effective national defense (16th-17th c.), 2) public education (18th-19th c.), 3) public health (19th-20th c.). Mileage will vary otoh, and all nations don't make quite the same priorities. Generally speaking the Western European expectation are for the state to do all three quite well. The US seems sort of undecided about the role of the state in everything but national defense. (And many Russians seem more or less be OK with a state that only really provides national defense.)
EnglishEdward
Deity
It was and is all smoke and mirrors, it wasn't working in the UK, crashed in 2008 and it will crash again.
Verbose
Deity
A bad idea from the start, and a good reason to avoid a repeat.
But Trump is still heading the US that way, again. And nothing says the UK conservatives aren't either — except the prospects of the UK's economic future are unusually murky over Brexit, so most bets are off.
I know, I know, but we ought to follow better standards.
Please use the delete function in future. That's what it's there for.
