(1) Use it to pay for medical care for all the extra stress-related illnesses we get in comparison to Europe,

(2) Pay for unworkable fad diets to lose all the weight from the obesity that results from not having enough time to exercise,

(3) Pay up into trust funds to subsidize our kids’ education since unlike in Ireland and France and Germany, we don’t have much state support of higher education,

(4) Pay to clean up the environmental mess left by corporations who are all but encouraged by the Executive Branch to dump their crap in our local streams, and

(5) Pay into our kids’ trust funds to prepare for the day when the real estate bubble crashes and we actually have to pay for our country’s $10 trillion or so national debt, racked up in part by stupid wars that our people are just too busy working to notice and protest against.

See, we Americans do wonderful things with our extra money.

you might be right about Israel’s economy on the whole, for all I know. Still, I’ve had a fair bit to do with Israeli companies over the years (most heavily in the later 90s and the beginning of the 00s, but to a lesser extent even unto this day). And most of what I saw was home-grown. Lots of foreign venture capital, of course, but that’s not quite the same thing as foreign firms opening up local operations.

And, in the cases of Israel and Ireland, the growth has come from (largely) US firms opening up operations in those two countries – organic internal economic growth has not been the main driver in either country.

Conversely, that much job creation likely wouldn’t even register in the data in a single major US urban area (NY/LA/Houston/Chicago), much less the nation as a whole. The same goes for the other large EU economies.

By all means a rich country like Ireland should be paying about 1% of GDP into the EU (IIRC, gross input is currently set at 1.14 percent per country).

The Irish GDP gets an annual 2 percent bonus. That’s not small, that’s huge.

To begin lets consider a completely unregulated market: no limit on hours per week or overtime compensation; lets throw out minimum wage. Nothing. Would this market be the most efficient, or better yet would it create the most happiness? Even given the difficulty in answering this question in a well-defined way, I want to say clearly not, but I’m not so sure what’s so clear about it. I just don’t buy the argument that the powerful have unfair leverage. Unless there is threat of violence against labor mobility (which was hardly uncommon), two people voluntarily entering into a contract is the definition of fair.

I suppose the central assertion of why this ‘no-regulation’ approach is undesirable is that there is an over supply of low-skill labor. Or said differently (assuming a ‘fair’ market), human productivity has an extremely skewed distribution.

Another important effect might be the non-divisibility of work, i.e. the boss knows that hiring two people at half the price and half the hours will result in less than full production.

So what is my point? My point is that in my opinion criticism of a free market system must be coupled with a discussion of how the market being discussed is inefficient. Once this is identified this will lead into how the government can implement regulation to produce a new market with some quantifiably better distribution.

Of course this essentially is what everyone assumed without feeling the need to say it, and just got straight to voicing their opinion on what type of government regulation is optimal. Only I feel that there is an abundance of certainty (as is common in the blog-o-sphere) when in the face of truly complex questions a bit more humility would perhaps be more conducive to a reasoned debate.

Though probably less fun…

Not becase of Dell. Because of their vibrant socialist economy.

Yes a ‘systemated concertation’ that reduced the size of government by 50% (26 points of GDP) … and slashed taxes by a third (corporate tax rate from 40% to 12.5%) to the lowest level in the EU, while deregulating markets and major employers … with the result that GDP growth tripled and GDP per capita zoomed up from 65% of the EU average to 120%, and #1 in the rankings (excluding Luxembourg, which doesn’t really count), while unemployment dropped from 17% to 4%.

Now it’s true that labor unions elsewhere don’t generally actively participate in such “systematized concertation” regarding such policies, taking a full partner role in planning them out and pushing them through the legislature. So this is not exactly a “British model”, it’s sui generis. But if you want to place it somewhere on the Continent, it’s obviously a heck of a lot closer to Britain than to Italy, Germany, France … though somewhere out in the ocean, maybe.

“Friedman implies that the subsidies have stopped when they obviously have not.”

No, but they’re down to 1% of GDP —compared to 6% of GDP back in the 1980s when unemployment was 17%, government spending was 53% of GDP, taxes were at Scandinavian levels, the country was broke, and the unions joined the “systematized concertation” of economic reform to make Ireland the richest country in Europe as it is today.

Precisely: it’s pretty damn deceitful of Airmiles to suggest that after the mid-80s the Tiger and the Circuit Board and the Leprechaun on Customer Support took over the show. Which, as I mentioned elsethread, was news to me, given the number of EU-flagged building projects dotted around Dublin during the 90s, and even a few years ago when I last visited.

Many Americans will shun time off for more pay.

Many Americans don’t get the choice. Or at least get a catch-22 arrangement. My wife has accrued the maximum amount of comp-time she can use at her job; she can’t actually take that time off, since staff levels are kept artificially low and to take time off would be considered ‘undermining the team’. No pay in lieu of comp time, either. Lovely. And that’s what Sebastian would call a ‘medium demand job’.