>The US is not a command economy and given the open nature of hiring and firing (few encumbrances) results in firms being able to hire quickly and fire quickly.

>The US is not a command economy and given the open nature of hiring and firing (few encumbrances) results in firms being able to hire quickly and fire quickly. Really? My epiphanic assessment from working in corporate America is that the single biggest challenge for American capitalism is that it's very difficult to fire people. That is, there is much more organizational friction in making a decision to fire, than to make a decision to hire. Even in at-will states, big companies require months or even years of "paper trail" to fire a non-performant or harmful employee. Notably, Amazon's aggressive PIP system seems to be specifically designed from the ground up to counter this problem, and even they seem to be dialing down the aggressiveness because of bad PR.