Europe is in many respects more market oriented and capitalist compared to the US. This is entirely not the issue.

And, I'm not sure why I need to spell this out to you, but both public and private life in Europe run on money that has to be generated by a healthy economy, which, we cannot expect, when Europe stops being competitive with respect to the US and China.

Thinking this is just about tech salaries is very first order thinking.

EDIT: Maybe I should add some context, and I'm sorry if I come off a bit condescending in my reply to you. We are facing governments who have no clue how to solve our economic woes, but who certainly have a plan on how to act: austerity measures. So all those nice things you associate with the European economic model are precisely the things that might cease to exist.

I guess I'm trying to point out that, again, Europe doesn't have economic woes to begin with compared to most people on earth. Competing on growth comes with extreme cost that has manifested as social and economic instability in the US. Our wealth inequality is much more severe; our poverty is much more damaging; our education systems have been steadily failing for the last forty years; our higher education systems are beginning to show extreme stress in an entirely different manner. Perhaps the sort of miasma that hangs over society that everything is just broken and the people to blame are often on tv is universal, but it's never been more obvious to me that there's a very, very different economy for the rich and PMC than there is for the rest of the country, more so here than most places.

Perhaps we can agree that the sort of people that gravitate to the top of the political-economy in both our societies cannot be trusted.... but I think this is a much easier case to make here where the protections against said people never had the full time to develop.