> And in Finland, they redistribute the North Sea oil money back into the economy Finland doesn't border the North Sea, nor does it produce a drop of oil from

> And in Finland, they redistribute the North Sea oil money back into the economy Finland doesn't border the North Sea, nor does it produce a drop of oil from anywhere else. I'm not quite sure which country you were thinking of there -- Norway quite explicitly doesn't pump the oil money into the local economy but runs a giant fund that invests the proceeds elsewhere, to be used once the oil runs out. It's also completely absurd to claim that Germany and Finland are somehow optimizing for per-capita income (wtf?), or that profit is the last priority, or that jobs are plentiful, or that one can't even get fired, etc. You appear to have built up some idealized version of Europe that has little to do with reality.