| | Bill -- Thanks for posting!
I've been writing about this issue for decades. Observe also the difference between the U.S. and E.U on the labor front.
Unemployment in the EU has averaged over 10 percent for more than a decade, compared to half that for the US. The average American who losses a job is unemployed for 4 months, the average European for a year. Private sector job creation in the EU on net is non-existent. Civilian employment in the U.S> has grown from 99.5 million in 1982 to over 143 million today.
European labor laws make it extremely difficult to fire workers during economic down-turns or just if they're bad workers. See my "Wash. Times" piece on this: http://www.washingtontimes.com/commentary/20060331-090627-2105r.htm
Vacation policy is equally stupid. See: http://www.cato.org/dailys/07-10-00.html
Thus employers usually won't hire workers even when they need them because they're so costly and the employers can never downsize.
Europe is going through a slow-motion version of the collapse that occurred in the communist bloc. The contradictions of high taxes, heavy-handed regulations and welfare-state policies are producing economic, political, social and moral problems that cannot be mitigated by the same policies that caused those problems to begin with.
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