*enshrined (pedantic). Though I don't think this entirely explains the difference. The same could be said for some EU countries: - "Irish issues are deeply ro

*enshrined (pedantic). Though I don't think this entirely explains the difference. The same could be said for some EU countries: - "Irish issues are deeply rooted in Christianity" - "Italian issues are deeply rooted in Christianity" - "Polish issues are deeply rooted in Christianity" - "Hungarian issues are deeply rooted in Christianity" It simply doesn't explain why the USA is so different from Ireland in terms of public policy. ----------------------------------------------- I think a bigger issue is which countries people (even europeans!) mean to include when they say "Europe". Usually they mean either "Northern Europe" and/or "Western Europe", or sometimes even a small subset of those (just the richest ones -- even Spain/Italy/Portugal are preferentially excluded sometimes depending on the topic). Some people probably started to get uncomfortable seeing "Poland" and "Hungary" up above, and have already steeled themselves for any further analysis involving "those" European countries. Many certainly wouldn't generally want to have to include Moldova, North Macedonia, Albania, and Belarus in their most casual definitions of "Europe", at least when comparing how good they have things things compared to the USA. ----------------------------------------------------- Breaking down "We have no HSAs, no three or four layer tax systems, no governments trying to legislate really bizarre religious issues, no paranoid militarised police, no busy-body suburban sprawl of interfering no-bodies.", I could look at two of these: - no governments trying to legislate really bizarre religious issues And counter with Poland and Hungary having some serious recent issues with abortion legislation/enforcement and LGBT freedoms. These are both "EU" nations, so it's hard to claim "Oh they're not part of Europe" but what is often implied is "Oh I wasn't talking about that Europe". But that's not a fair comparison because when we say "USA" we don't just mean California. - no paranoid militarised police I get what the commenter is saying. Yes, the overzealous policing situation is generally worse across the USA than the EU. But we can find regular abuse by police officers against Roma communities across Bulgaria, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Romania, and Slovakia (once again, people will often say "Oh when I say Europe I'm not talking about Bulgaria or Romania or Slovakia", as if the USA could ever just exclude the ten worst states when talking about "USA" things as well). We also see increased militarization of police in Germany with the BFE+ anti-terror police units. And many protestors of the Gilets Jaune in France certainly saw the results of clashing with increasingly militarized police as well[0][1], including armored transport vehicles. To which some people will say "oh that's not the police, that's the Gendarmerie", which is a bit of an odd argument as that's specifically a domestic police force, and one that is explicitly militarized. What they mean by this is that the "average" police officer a citizen is likely to encounter will be less militarized, and that's true. But saying "we have no militarized police" is pretty off-the-mark. 0: https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/politics/article/les-gilets-jaunes https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/politics/article/les-gilets-ja... 1: https://7enews.net/en/news-en/world-news-en/france-says-police-to-use-armoured-vehicles-against-riots/ https://7enews.net/en/news-en/world-news-en/france-says-poli...