> it seems to be pure malice that they don't just give it to everyone.

Only if you consider malice ~= profit.

Why would you not? What is malice if not intentionally harming people out of greed? Is it only malice if the intention is explicitly and strictly sadistic?

Some woeful 'giving the benefit of the doubt' in some of these comments. No disrespect.

Not just malice, profit too

isn't this the "free market" that many in the US brag about?

Not quite. It would be a free market if people could freely move across borders. The overall arrangement that we have - where goods and services flow almost freely, but the movement of consumers and labor is restricted - is inherently abusive.

Kinda, but this is also how the free market dies—happens little by little. A change here, a law there that helps the people, oops, now the law makes it harder for competition to get in, and so on and so forth.

The business models this regulation harms are the business models that aren't desired to begin with. As such, a competitor is encouraged by regulation to find another, compliant angle to deal with monetization.

And competitors that already do that get an uplift (over time, but still).

Btu a free market (which is devoid of anti-competition regulation) also makes it harder for competition to get-in. Not to mention the problems of regulatory-capture (see: Boeing and the FAA).

It's almost as if the best (or rather: least-worst) option we have lies somewhere in-between laissez faire capitalism and mandatory state-ownership of all industry...

I don't think even the most well-intentioned state have the incentives to properly allocate resources in the market. Usually, when state-owned industries fail, the taxpayer suffers, so the administration has little to no incentive to actually do good in the long run.

It's not a 1D spectrum. You can have laissez-faire arrangements that still preclude massive concentration of capital (and thus effectively gut capitalism) without going all in on public ownership of everything. The key thing to remember is that private property rights themselves require some kind of government to maintain by using force when necessary - i.e. the existence of private property is inherently a step away from true "laissez-faire". Thus the government doesn't need to aggressively collectivize anything to avoid concentration of capital; it just needs to refuse to protect such concentrated capital.

> somewhere in-between laissez faire capitalism and mandatory state-ownership of all industry >

Yes, which describes both the US and Europe. It just comes down to where to fall on that spectrum.

If you think about it, the US seems to be voluntarily headed to universal plug for charging EVs after many years of incompatibility. EU got that almost immediately.

Though, it can be argued that the US plug is a bit better since the standart that almost all companies finally agreed to adopt is the Tesla one. However, it could have been the other way around too - the companies could have adopted a very shitty plug if Tesla had a shitty plug simply because their adoption is based on the charging network dominance and not on the plug superiority.

So, I guess its not a clear cut.

You know there's a lot more world out there than the EU and US, right?

Sure, you should write about it.