this post was submitted on 11 Jan 2024
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Certified European here, can confirm individual member states and EU as a whole as not being a utopia.
Especially us Dutch folks who have been fucked over and held hostage by a waaay to large upper middle class for years. To the point where we've managed to abolish the ministry of housing, open up the housing market to foreign investors, replace a functioning healthcare system with a healthcare market where insurance firms rule with an iron fist and demand more bureacracy than actual care being provided.
... and the list goes on.
It's a worldwide symptom of economic unequality and the decrease in social skills stemming from the fact that we live our lives increasingly isolated in our own online social bubbles. We're turning increasingly hostile towards each other because we're no longer confronted with all people and perspectives in our surroundings, but just the ones we like.
The United States, being a large country filled with very diverse people, despite all being taught to "love America", still deals with Nebraskan farmers having wildly different wants and needs, and way different social standards than the Californian yuppies.
You're a large country, with 334 million people spread out over a vast amount of land. Meanwhile, we're 18 million living on a patch of marshy land roughly 3/4th the size of West Virgina, and we're further from being united than ever before. The fact that you're even holding together as a country is nothing short of amazing considering the fact that your political systems probably cause way more chaos than ours do.
A lot of Europeans probably mean it when they say "How are you even a country?". And it's not so much an attack on the American people as a whole (though some of y'all deserve to be made fun of), but geniuine amazement at the fact that it has more or less held together since 1776.
As another European, I do blame the US' hegemony for a lot of this, but yeah, we're basically all getting fucked.
I think the root cause is the deregulation/privatisation of everything that started in the 80s. It slanted the playing field towards those with capital at the cost of workers and the cash has been flowing into their pockets and out of ours ever since
It's a global phenomenon, caused by infinite growth based economic modeling (you know, where you base your whole economy on extracting increasing amounts of value from finite resources).
This type of modeling has been proven wrong and debunked early in the previous century, but it is still practised because it works very well for those gaining most of the profits.
You'll usually hear the politicians promoting policies that help the larger companies argue that such policies directly create jobs and thus economic value for the people. But this is more of that trickle-down economics bullshit that doesn't apply in the real world.
Because politicians worldwide have been so fixated on financial gains as a measure of the economy, they fail to measure and correct on (mental) healthcare, housing, education and equality.
Just some context on how large our housing problems have become: There is currently a deficit of 450 000 homes, which is projected to grow past 500 000 by the end of 2024.
The time we stop running countries like we do companies is when we'll see things improve.