Lee at Right Thinking found the following in a post at MSNBC
The reason that privacy laws in Europe and the U.S. are so different springs from a basic divergence in attitude: Europeans reserve their deepest distrust for corporations, while Americans are far more concerned about their government invading their privacy.
It is a good article, for those who have a free moment or two. It lays out many of the differences between US and EU law. One point I did find funny was this:
The regulations governing the passage of information from Europe to the U.S. are often so strict that many companies largely ignore them.
“In all my years of practice I have never heard clients come in and say, ‘OK, what do I have to do to be 70 percent compliant?’ I hear that now,†he said.
W-w-w-wha? Is he actually saying that if there are too many laws, everyone is a criminal because no one can actually follow them all?
Imagine that! The very reason why Americans trust government less than they do companies right there in the article itself!
My main reason for giving more stock to companies than I do government is not that one though. It is because government can kill me legally. All they have to do is make up a law, put a punishment of death on it, convict me of it and I’m dead. No private corporation has that power. They can do a lot of things, including lobby for the passage of bills, but what good would it do them to kill off their customer base?
The Euros would rather their government be able to tell them how to live than to have their boss be able to fire them for doing contract work on company time.
Typically backwards Euro thought processes. The less Euro I can be, the better.
In .Gov we trust.
On the flip side, most European countries don’t have the death penalty.