[GoldenMonkey]

This is a false dichotomy. The government and politicians makes and mandates decisions that are detrimental to society. Often to their own benefit.

And they have no competition. It would be too political to list these. But, I am sure both sides of the political spectrum can come up with innumerable examples.

[unity1001]

> The government and politicians makes and mandates decisions that are detrimental to society.

Thats a RELIGIOUS statement. The government and politicans are elected by their people. They take decisions that were mandated by their people. If the people mandate something, that's that.

In Anglosphere, where FPTP system prevents the people's will from being reflected in actual politics may be causing such an environment in which what the politicians do and what the people want have little to do with each other. And it does seem to be so.

But in any country with proportional representation, its as it should be: Its the democratic will of the people that something happens.

"The people" does not need to have 'competition'. The people are, well, the society. Proposing that they need 'competition' or their power to be curbed is reactionary.

[xdennis]

Firstly, with your government, you get a vote. But just about competition: the competition is that you can move to a different jurisdiction (i.e. country). And there's a lot more competition there than there is with phone makers or phone OSes.

If a Frenchman doesn't like French laws he can move to Germany and haul all his stuff there (and his pension, etc). But if you don't like the Apple ecosystem anymore, Apple will make it as difficult as possible to move.

The free market isn't the utopia libertarians think it is. You don't get to protest inside Apple, you can't petition for redress of grievances, if Apple terminates your account, you don't get a judge or jury of your Apple peers to rule if it was right or wrong.

[_abox]

> If a Frenchman doesn't like French laws he can move to Germany and haul all his stuff there (and his pension, etc).

A bit offtopic but this is still something I find very lacking in the EU.

For all the good it's brought us, we still have extremely different social security in each country and if you've lived in many EU countries throughout your life it's a complete PITA to reconcile things like pensions. Some countries have state pensions, others only voluntary corp plans.. I have no idea how this will turn out when I retire.

IMO these different systems should at the very least be talking together.

[Moru]

At least between Finland and Sweden it seems to work fine. My mother is from Finland and lives in Sweden now. She got a phonecall from Finland when it was time for her pension. Just confirmed with her and set it up so she gets her pension transfered to her account every month. She had just about forgotten about it since it was 40+ years ago she moved to Sweden.

[emj]

As is stated below countries with similar systems cooperate easier, Scandinavia, Germany, Netherlands are more or less automatic. This is slowly getting better, EU is working on it. Some key words: EESSI with RINA (stands for reference implementation..), and more generally "single digital gateway eu". The pessimist in me says that it will not be done for all countries with in 20 years, unless we give some countries lots of infrastructure for free.

[GekkePrutser]

Ah ok I've not seen the benefits of this. I'm from the Netherlands but lived in Ireland and Spain. I don't think they have these setups.

But I think this needs much more priority than the 'one market' benefits for big business they're working on. It's really a mess if you move around in the EU now, it's not at all like in America.

They should fix the voting too: Right now as an expat I can only vote for my home country which has zero bearing on the country I live in :/ And changing nationalities takes 10+ years.

For other stuff like health I don't mind as much (especially as Spain has a much better state health system than the Netherlands' privatised crap :) )

[emj]

These are the rules for elections in Sweden; one year until you can vote in local elections, five years for national elections. You should always research this when entering a new country for work, applying for citizenship is usually a very rigid process, and it will depend on the time you send in you application. I do not know if these rules are the same all over EU.

About cooperation between countries; At least the gears are turning, even if it is not somethings that is high on the political agenda. The biggest issue is to have a central database that maps one identity in one country to another. We have not even figured out Inter-country Electronic IDs (via EIDAS) yet, there is no way to even do a manual match of identities between countries using eID. That makes it impossible for you to log on and check your pensions if you work in the wrong country.