I think it’s more about two different definitions of freedom. The U.S. defines it as the freedom to choose, where harmful outcomes are an accident of letting people freely choose. The E.U. sees it more as the freedom to live, where choices that harm quality of life need to be restrained.

The EU constrains companies to the benefit of individuals. It's not stopping people from hurting themselves, it's stopping them from being hurt by companies who have phenomenal power over us, more power in some ways than states themselves have.

Whatever criticism the EU attracts for its spending, the PR budget looks to be pretty good value. I'm really baffled by some of these perspectives.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/may/08/lobbyists-euro...

Also, your 30K figure also includes lobbyists from civil rights groups and other NGO's. Not just purely companies.

Lobbying happens, it is how people influence politics. Better to be transparant and open about it them to hide it.

[1] http://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/BRIE/2015/57280...

To American values, restrictions on how you do business are as infringing as restrictions on individual rights.

Along that same line of thinking, I think another historical American value/attitude is that a business is a person. More precisely, businesses only exist because individual people decide to take risks with their lives in the pursuit of whatever values they hold. Since they hold the risk privately, they get to hold the rewards privately.

That many people who take such risks value financial profit may be a concern to some, but is a non-concern to society as long as the marketplace is free of coercion.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Amendment_to_the_United_...

Here's one of the many articles about what's wrong with it.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/06/eus-copyright-proposal...

Maybe we could try to find a single US law that we don't like and dismiss America just as readily?

In limiting businesses more in the EU I found out that it generally means less competition and fewer companies (per capita) than the US, in my limited experience of having lived in the EU most of my life before moving to the US and still visiting Europe every year. One of the most common shocks of moving to the US from Europe is the sheer number of options/choices that you have/can make for every little thing. Back in Europe there was 1-2 supermarket chains, here there are much more. Same for food (fast or otherwise), insurance agencies, banks/credit unions, broker services, pension funds plus countless small stores (not national chains). In most interactions I have in the US I really do feel that "the customer is always right" (there are lots of exceptions to that rule but you will generally see those exceptions also happen because of lack of competition) while in Europe most of the interactions I had as a customer meant I would have to either beg for something or get angry about it/make a scene in order to make progress on an issue.

There are also deeper cultural differences in criteria customers use to pick one company or the other. In the US people seem more willing to vote with their wallets and do not look back while I feel much less of that happening in Europe.

It's hard of course to generalize across such large and varied populations and economies but this has been my experience and it does align with logical explanations of consequences of limiting businesses more or less in a free market environment.

The sentence reads funny as if people/individuals don't own companies. A better way to put it would be that they value some kinds of people over other kinds of people. Or users over entrepreneurs, or something besides just the ambiguous "people".