[piva00]

> Instead of using Amazon as punching ball they should rather ponder why the EU economy and EU companies are falling behind...

Probably because it's not a free-for-all on who makes more money with no accountability to 2nd and 3rd order effects on society. If we care about citizens' wellbeing before profits there are many things that become less profitable and/or competitive than in places with less safeguards against corporations damages.

[mytailorisrich]

> If we care about citizens' wellbeing before profits

That's a meaningless slogan and not mutually exclusive.

Ultimately without profits and a productive economy the citizens' wellbeing will become unaffordable and take a nosedive. This is already happening throughout Europe.

[piva00]

It's not a meaningless slogan, it means to consider the balance between economic growth vs potential damage caused by growth as a goal.

Consider the case for food, you can remove regulations and let it be a free for all race to the bottom to who can produce the most food for the cheapest price without a care about the environment, food safety or how sustainable it will be; or you can try to regulate known externalities that will cause an increase in costs, prices but will reduce damages to society as a whole.

Or the case for heavy industry, you can deregulate everything and not care about worker safety, environmental impact, and allow factories to be placed near water reservoirs with no water treatment; or you try to zone out factories to places with less impact to populated areas, require them to treat waste, impose restrictions on how they should gas out potential harmful by-products (CO2, sulfides, etc.).

The whole point is to strike a balance between economic growth and not allowing this growth to be detrimental to society in the long-term, it's a pretty damn complex task and a whole apparatus exist around it exactly because it's not simple.

If this is meaningless to you then I'm sorry but we have very different worldviews to how economic growth should be attained; I'd much rather have societies thinking about this rather than purely pushing economic growth at all costs, damned be the ones suffering from its side-effects.

> Ultimately without profits and a productive economy the citizens' wellbeing will become unaffordable and take a nosedive. This is already happening throughout Europe.

I don't believe it's happening throughout Europe, it's still one of the richest places on the entire Earth, it might be lagging behind the USA's and China's growth but both of these societies suffer much more the side-effects of their growth (and push those onto humanity as a whole when considering emissions of greenhouse gasses).