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No country has a pure implementation of any ideology. Ideologies are directions you want to take society, and economic systems are always a balance. But the US
by mcv 1y ago
No country has a pure implementation of any ideology. Ideologies are directions you want to take society, and economic systems are always a balance. But the US is quite a bit more blatantly capitalist, with its lack of holidays, lack of worker rights, and everything geared towards an even more extreme division of wealth.
Netherland, and northern Europe in general (I never meant to single out Netherland specifically; Scandinavia is probably ahead of us), is absolutely capitalist, but not nearly to the extreme that the US is, and has more labour protection, better social welfare, better regulations. Not to the extent that it should have; it's still falling way short, and Netherland in particular has been falling further short since the neoliberalist wave of the 1990s and the string of right-wing governments of the past 25 years. But it's not the worst of the world in this regard, and it still has a fairly effective balance that consistently puts it near the top of most freedom and happiness indexes with the rest of northern Europe.
It's by no means perfect, and there's a lot that needs to be improved, but compared to most other countries, this is clearly a pretty effective system.
- roenxi 1y agoDid you know the Netherlands, back in 2019, scored [0] the highest wealth inequality globally according to Wiki? Just saying. It does look like a bit of a fluke but I found that hilarious. Although the wiki article actually specifically cites them for having good statistics so there must be some confidence. So earlier, when we're talking about blood-soaked capitalists, we're not talking about the Dutch with their history of blood soaked capitalism and their ongoing largely uninterrupted capitalist tradition. But we are talking about the people who don't take very many holidays and lack "workers rights" - where I note that the US has had their ability to negotiate with their corporate overlords eroded so far that they get a median income of maybe 10% higher than the Netherlands [1]? Most workers should really work on chipping away at their rights, it appears to improve their bargaining position! Maybe PPP can give the Dutch an edge, but we're talking about a pretty marginal difference to start talking about one obviously being the more blood-steeped. I mean, look. We don't really have anything to talk about here but I am going to say I'm not sure you know a capitalist country when you see it. If we're talking about the blood-soaked ones, the Netherlands are capitalist heartland. Not quite as bad as the UK. But bad enough that I suppose I can see why they'd rather rebrand as something other than straight capitalists. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_wealth_inequality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_we... [1] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/median-income-by-country https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/median-in...