I can assure you that there is a lot of talking about that. Right now, there is serious discussion here in Italy about taking away some job protection from those who have too much (usually older people) and give some more to those who have none at all, through some kinds of contracts (usually younger people).

I don't think that deregulation is always right, but it is when you have too much - and we do have too much regulation, too much discretionarily applied.

But that's just talking about labor restrictions, and it's standard political bickering, nothing revolutionary will come out of that, Europe is too populist for any real change to happen. What I'm talking about is restructuring the tax/welfare system with something like this : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_income_tax

Eliminate paper currency and only have digital transactions, force the banks to disclose accounts and transaction information to remove gray economy and use NIT scheme instead of all the special programs. That way everyone get's the same safety net when they are unemployed or poorly paid and you can have unregulated at-will employment because employees aren't forced to negotiate for bare minimum.