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.

Imagine two people in a tug of war. One person is determined to pull the other as far as possible to his side. The other person is determined to stay still. Not give in, but also not apply too much effort to pull the other person to his side. Who is going to win?

We disagree fundamentally on the dynamics of the worldwide economic system. Growth is necessary. It is imperative for survival. Without growth your "steady state" local economy will be out competed. And especially at a time when Europe's geopolitical relevance is waning and when the world is entering a multipolar world order, we definitely do not want to find ourselves in such a weak situation. China and Japan both ran such centuries long experiments in the past and neither one of those experiments was successful.