Healthcare is just the tip of the iceberg of the welfare state. 
Not a point of debate, but a question: Were European companies ever “expected” to provide healthcare the way US companies have been expect to? My understanding is that employer-provided healthcare in the US is rooted in the peculiarities of our tax law and the situation during WWII. Wages were frozen, so it became common of employers to offer healthcare as a benefit since labor was scarce and they weren’t free to tinker with wages (plus benefits weren’t taxed like wage income). After the war, the practice just stuck and it sort of got ingrained in the US psyche that health insurance was something you “naturally” got from your employer.
In my post above, I noted that you have to look at subsidies as well as tarrifs. If you take the position that US companies “have to” provide healthcare benefits (in some states that actually do), then it’s not unreasonable to consider government funded healthcare insurance in Europe to be a subsidy to industry. It’s all a matter of one’s perspective, and it’s things like that that get in the way of free trade negotiations. Both sides have legitimate arguments to make, and there often is no good solution other than for one side to concede to the other (countries don’t like to do that).
Why assume that? The U.S. did a lot of importing and exporting even in the days when we had protective tariffs.
Quartz, please don’t hijack an interesting thread. Not only is a large public sector in a country’s economy not socialism, but the vast majority of West European countries prefer their current economic system, and it doens’t seem to have harmed their current economic performance. Plus, of course, on health spending (among other factors) the US spends a much higher percentage of their GDP, even when you cut out the private sector, than do most European gov.s.
Restrictive labour laws in some countries (ie. France) may hinder their economic performance in terms of growth and GNP, but many of those countries (ie. France) enjoy much greater quality of life than in more their more economically competitive members (eg. Britain).
I’m interested in the OP because it seems to me it is difficult, if not impossible, to introduce a completely open trade system without standardising things like labour laws and product descriptions across countries. For example, if factories in Spain can produce something which, according to Spainish trade standards is chocolate, and market such in America even though it does not meet American definitions of chocolate (a similar issue to what some countries [France] were complaining about when they standardised various systems across the EU), then it seems, well, unfair, and I’d think that Americans would complain (especially those who represented chocolate manufacturers). Similarly, I would think that the ability to impose tariffs is something that could not be taken away without introducing sovereignty issues.
It seems an interesting idea, but unlikely to get far unless accompanied by EU-style integration on some levels, which seems to often lead to social and even political integration.
I can only speak for Britain, being shamefully ignorant of other European countries’ post-19th century history, but to my knowledge there has never been such a system- we passed directly from paying for healthcare at the point of purchase (ie. from a doctor) in the period pre-1911 to the social insurance system insituted with the budgets of 1909-11, in which a worker payed a portion of his paycheck to the government each week for a publicly funded doctor’s treatment for a set number of days each year. Then came the post-War labour government and the creation of the NHS. Frankly, I wouldn’t have expected most (Western) European countries to have differed too greatly, although obviously dates and names would change.
There may have been some sort of small-scale employer-paid insurance scheme set up pre-1911, but I don’t think it was on a large enough scale to register in any of the histories of the period I’ve read.
Well, I didn’t take “insulated economy” to mean strictly “not many tariffs” but in a broader sense of openess to freetrade with other nations. Sort of irrelavant now as Quartz apparently ment something totally different.
In anycase, I still think that imports/exports is a decent first hand estimation of relative openess to free trade, for the simple reason that tariffs and the like chase away trade to other, more competitve countries. If the EU had was heavily more protective then the US, I think much of thier trade with other nations would come here. Of course lots of other factors intrude, but again I was just trying to show the EU wasn’t widly more protective then the US.
Of course the most obvious indication of the EU’s openess to free trade is the fact that its member states all joined…the EU, which so far as I know is the most “free trade” trade agreement between nations. So my argument is doubly irrelavant.
Actually, in France, healthcare is funded by a tax on wages (and the healthcare sytem run by elected representants of employers and employees). So, companies shoulder most of healthcare costs (the state participitate for the coverage of people who have been unemployed for more than two years, self-employed or independantly wealthy people pay for themselves, etc… so there are some exceptions).
They also shoulder in the same way the burden of most other major social programms, like retirement pensions, unemployment benefits, etc…).
I believe it’s roughly the same in Germany (though i’m not sure). So, don’t assume that in Europe, healthcare isn’t a cost for private companies.
I think most of the issue fall down to the different ways we interpreted the word “insulated”.
You mean, members of parliament?
Good point. But French health care is also cheaper as a whole, so even if the entire burden of healthcare fell on employers, it would still make them more competitive then their US counterparts.
Indeed, this has been an actual issue, and France (and I suppose some other countries) cave in. Now, I’ve to read the labels to know whether what I bought is actually chocolate or some chocolate look-alike stuff where cocao butter has been replaced by whatever fat happened to be the cheapest on the world market :mad:
Yeah, I was thinking of that, although I don’t believe Spain was the manufacturer- maybe Italy? Sorry if it seemed I was France-bashing in my post- it was mostly for comedic effect, but it certainly seems that France does the most complaining in the EU.
Actually, it did vary greatly. In Germany, social programms, as surprising as it might be, have been implemented first by Bismarck, in order to counter the influence of socialist parties and unions.
In France it arose from the collective healthcare and retirement schemes that had been created within many major companies or industrial branches by unions, by owners or quite often by a agreement between both. It was made mandatory and centralized, but still under the control of the unions/employers and originally only insuring workers. So, sort of, in France the healthcare system as build on the basis of a situation quite similar to the current one in the USA.
Anecdotically, the former schemes actually still exist to the extent that they still pay retirement pensions to quite old workers. At some point I had to deal with the admnistrative costs of such older insurance schemes as specific as the retirement fund of the former miners of the occupied German regions, or such things.
You mean more than the UK? :eek:
Don’t worry, I didn’t take that as France bashing.
Forget about it, I was wrong. They have been elected only for a short while, and not even recently (to my defense, I don’t, or rather didn’t get to vote in these elections, and the change happened after I studied social security law). Still, I’m ashamed by my utter ignorance. I discovered it when I tried to find out how it works exactly for the employers in order to respond to your post.
Now, the administrators are designated by the unions and the organizations of employers (roughly half of the seats for the unions, half for the employers, plus some more seats for people like representants of the mutual insurances, or things like that) . And I’ve no clue how it works in practice, nor could I find any info. For instance, how do they decide how many seats a particular union gets? Since there are other similar elections (for instance, the courts ruling on work-related cases are staffed by “judges” elected half by the employers, half by the employees), maybe on the basis of the results of these elections? Just a guess because I couldn’t find it out.
Walking away in shame… Even more so since I don’t like at all this reform, since it was part of a more general reform that caused a major raucus and I still missed that, and since it happened…10 years ago!!!
I found a relatively recent form to protest against the lack of elections to sent to your MP, though. I’m probably going to make a call to my union to find out what they think of it too. But I suspect I’m coming a little late into this battle.
[minor, but semi-relevant hijack] NAFTA already makes certain provisions for movement of people in certain occupations among member countries; details here and here.
(Not that this movement is exactly “free and unfettered,” but when speaking of U.S. immigration issues, practically nothing meets those criteria.)
I think the main issue would be monetary policy. I’d support free trade between the EU and the USA.
However, I’d fight any attempt to limit the independence of the Fed to make decisions on monetary policy. I don’t always agree with Greenspan/Bernanke but I know I’m glad they are free to set monetary policy outside of political influence.
Shouldn’t be a problem. The UK is a full member of the EU but they’ve kept the pound and, I presume, control over their own monetary policy.
Yes, but Blair wants to promote the adoption of the Euro, and the public’s opposition is one of the factors slowing depper UK integration with the EU.