> Most of us would not prefer to follow the EU into irrelevancy. If they were the model for how we should be running things how come they are not the ones running the show on innovation?

I think innovation is a tricky thing to measure, firstly. Certainly the US benefits massively from the world's largest capital markets, sucking in foreign money from all over the world. Is that innovation? is it stock price, or is it the work of all the academics, engineers, tech people etc?

Like, Europe (and the EU at the time) is where Deepmind came from, without which we'd be vanishingly unlikely to have seen Transformers/LLMs etc. Nokia basically made mobile phones a global category. ASML provides something that neither the US nor China can match.

And just to note, property taxes make up a much larger proportion of state revenue in the US than in the EU, if that's how you're measuring things.

And i didn't say anything about how great the EU was, I just noted that the US & the EU make up most of the richest countries in the world, where rich people like to live, so a wealth tax would probably work relatively effectively at that level.

Obviously that's not going to happen, but land and property taxes could get us a lot of the way there, with much less issues with capital flight and tax collection.