You wrongly assume the job market is a perfect market. It's not; there are barriers to entry, barriers to exit and lots of asymmetric negotiation positions.
Nobody said it's a perfect market. It's not a market dominated by monopolies either. The heavy handed solutions provided by minimum wages and other government measures doesn't help matters. They mask some problems while creating many others due to economic dislocation.
In the end, masterminds planning all our lives and trying to create utopia on earth have never done better than following simpler rules of law and letting people deal with each other in a free market capitalistic system.
Sorry, the GP reasoning assumes a perfect market, when stating that people are free to choose another employer if the current one is not paying enough. What wasn't stated in my comment is that the market is not perfect because of monopolistic behaviour. You kick off your argument with two misinterpretations of my comment and the GP's.
The market is illiquid, for example, because of exit/entry costs associated with relocation, such as selling your home at underwater values. This is one example of the factors I mentioned. Others abound.
The utopia/mastermind argument falls flat when you consider whether the US model is ahead of social-democrat states such as Denmark or Sweden. A cursory look at stats such as infant mortality rates or % of population below the poverty line strongly suggests the "mastermind" model is better.
* The utopia/mastermind argument falls flat when you consider whether the US model is ahead of social-democrat states such as Denmark or Sweden*
If we're doing a comparison, we need to compare across other utopian states. You need to throw in Greece, Italy, Portugal, the Soviet Union, North Korea, etc. You don't just get to cherry pick a couple of the few reasonable successes on your side of the ledger.
Furthermore, you have to realize that there's a memetic/genetic difference in Denmark vs the US. We can no more adopt the rules and policies of Denmark here than the US can impose its style of democracy on Afghanistan.
Finally, I would argue that countries like Denmark receive an amazing amount of benefit from other countries like the United States which provide most of the defense and technological advances that give them a cozy safe environment in which they get to spend most of their money on social programs.
I'll take the bait on the three states you mention that are indeed stable democracies following a social-democrat strategy: Greece, Italy and Portugal. I'll drop the Soviet Union and North Korea, which are straw men in your argument, for plainly obvious reasons.
Let's back our conversation with numbers, shall we? Infant mortality rates and percent of population below the poverty line.
Infant mortality rates (deaths by 1000 live births)[1,4]: United States 6.81, Greece 4.65, Italy 3.51, Portugal 4.45, EU 4.49
% of population below poverty line [2,3]: United States 15.1%, Greece 20%, Portugal 18%, Italy 18,2%
So, I think we can close the discussion on infant mortality rates. It'd be a stretch proving that the US is better than Greece with those numbers.
As for the poverty threshold, I could argue that the numbers are within the same order of magnitude, but I don't really have to. Some statistics gimmicks are occurring here: The US poverty line is defined at an annual income of around $11k, for a median national income of around $50k. The EU defines the poverty line at percentile 40% of national income. Easily any of the European countries has one order of magnitude less poor people than the US.
You brought up indicators on innovation and defence spending. As for defence, it's an endless discussion, where I guarantee you, many people in the world would wave away US military intervention outside of its own borders in a heartbeat. Innovation is a more interesting topic, since it's often touted as a bastion of the US. Here, the sheer scale of the US is misleading. Try to compare with aggregates of the same dimension, like the EU: http://ec.europa.eu/enterprise/policies/innovation/files/ius... You'll find that the US/Japan do lead, but nowhere can they be defined as the world providers of R&D, from where other countries benefit.
