A shortage can also be physical. The fuel you already bought (and possibly paid for) cannot be delivered. Maybe the actual delivery is the issue. Maybe a government confiscated it for other uses. Or maybe the fuel doesn't exist at all, because the refinery didn't have the oil to produce it.
Economic growth has been slow in the EU, but it's mostly a demographic issue. There are too many retirees, too few children, and the size of the workforce is stagnant.
Measuring economic growth in someone else's currency can be misleading. By the same metric you used, Eurozone economy grew by ~100% between 2002 and 2008.
I guess it depends on what you are used to and what you have grown to expect.
Life is not fair, but you can learn to accept what is expected from you by the circumstances of your birth. I had to serve in the military, because I was born a man and a Finnish citizen. I accepted that, because it was my lot in life. My rights and duties would have been different, had I been a woman or a Swedish or US citizen.
On the other hand, I would have found it extremely unfair if conscription had been based on a random lot. Regardless of if it would have covered only men or women as well. It would be unfair to condemn someone to serve due to bad luck, when another person like them is allowed to walk free.
Universality is the fundamental justification for conscription. Conscripts should only have to fight in a war that is serious enough that the country is willing to send all its sons (and daughters, if you prefer that) to risk their lives. If the country does not believe in the war enough to justify that, it should send volunteers, not conscripts.
The vast majority of men in my grandparents' generation served in WW2. Most of them saw combat. That was always the expectation what conscription is supposed to be for. My parents' generation saw their peers in the US conscripted and sent to fight in Vietnam. But only some men were conscripted, and only some conscripts were sent to Vietnam. It's not inherently wrong to use conscripts in a foreign war, but it's wrong to use them in a war that's too unpopular and too irrelevant to justify mobilizing the entire generation.
The data behind the graph is probably from OECD, which does not use a public/private classification. Mostly because in many OECD countries, "public" healthcare is largely funded by private insurance.
According to OECD data, US healthcare spending in 2023 was 28% from government schemes, 55% from health insurance, 11% out-of-pocket, and 5% from other sources. For most countries, the health insurance category is further split into compulsory and voluntary categories, but that distinction does not really exist in the US.
All US health insurance spending is reported in the compulsory health insurance category. Probably because the bulk of the spending is from employment-based insurance, which is effectively mandatory. (You usually can't opt out and take cash instead.) Naive aggregators then combine government spending and compulsory insurance and report that as public spending.
It's the natural way commodities are priced in the market.
Those large industrial customers often also end up selling the electricity in the market. Power companies need multi-decade commitments before they are willing to build anything as capital intensive as a nuclear reactor. In that time, industrial customers need to modernize their factories to keep them competitive. Which is often the time they realize it's more profitable to invest that money somewhere else and wind down the old factories.
The EU doesn't work like that. It's a union of sovereign states, not a central government.
Banning the member states from legislating something would require changes to the Treaties of the European Union. And that in turn would require unanimous consent from the member states.
The EU could legislate the matter on its own, which would override national laws. But it's not in the habit of doing narrow single-purpose laws, because that's not in the culture of the people who run the union. Instead, there would probably be a comprehensive law on internet blocking and censorship, which would be a very bad idea.
The model has not really eroded. It just became more obvious that some people had assumptions that were always wrong.
In some circles, it was popular to assume that academic degrees are supposed to be job training instead of education. And then that got interpreted narrowly as the skills you need in your first job after graduation. But a full career is 40+ years. Even when the job market was not changing as quickly as now, nobody could predict the skills you would need 20 years later. If you bought that viewpoint, you spent years preparing for the first few years of your career, which was obviously wasteful.
The actual value proposition was already stated 200+ years ago:
> There are undeniably certain kinds of knowledge that must be of a general nature and, more importantly, a certain cultivation of the mind and character that nobody can afford to be without. People obviously cannot be good craftworkers, merchants, soldiers or businessmen unless, regardless of their occupation, they are good, upstanding and – according to their condition – well-informed human beings and citizens. If this basis is laid through schooling, vocational skills are easily acquired later on, and a person is always free to move from one occupation to another, as so often happens in life.
Of course, colleges can be made more cost-effective by focusing more narrowly on education. For some reason, American higher education ended up being weirdly collectivist in an otherwise individualist culture. The ideal college experience became a separate stage of life between childhood and adulthood. You live on a campus outside the real world, and that campus is located in a place few people would otherwise move to. The incentives got weird, and colleges started prioritizing aspects of the college experience that are not directly related to education.
Governments provide services to all kinds of people. Some services exist to help people with specific needs, while others just try to make everyone's lives a little bit nicer. Public libraries are in the latter category, at least in Finland.
Libraries, like institutions in general, evolve over time. Libraries have extended their range services from books and study spaces to newspapers and magazines to music recordings to computers, printers, and internet access to all kinds of devices to event spaces and meeting rooms, and so on. At some point, you have to decide whether all these services should be under the umbrella of the same organization, or if you should create a new organization. But because new organizations mean more administrative overhead, you only create them if you expect it to improve the services.
Many of the more traditional libraries I've used were located in various community centers. In addition to the library, those centers might have event spaces, exhibition spaces, adult education programs, youth centers, and so on. Oodi might have fancier architecture and a more central location, but it's fundamentally not that different.
Russia had two revolutions in 1917. In the first one, pretty much everyone who mattered was unhappy with the regime. After some clashes between protesters and internal security forces, the emperor abdicated. A provisional government formed by established politicians took control, but it had to share power with workers' councils. The country became fragmented.
The provisional government was center-left, the army was mostly controlled by the right, and the workers' councils leaned towards revolutionary left. The right wanted to use the army to arrest Bolshevik leaders. The government declined, fearing a military coup. The right saw the government siding with the left and made an actual coup attempt. The government had to rely on the workers' councils to stop it. Which then emboldened the Bolsheviks to stage a revolution of their own a bit later.
But because the right was definitely not on board this time, the second revolution was only partially successful. Instead of a controlled regime change, the Bolsheviks got a civil war that lasted five years and killed millions.
The critical reality to understand is that people have always used violence. If they don't believe that they live in a successful society, or if they believe that the success of the society is not distributed fairly (or in a way that benefits them), violence starts looking attractive.
Enlightenment and industrialization created societies that were fairer, wealthier, and more free than anything before. They also created ideologies such as communism and nationalism that killed hundreds of millions. If your ideas are good and successful in the long term but create poverty, suffering, and feelings of unfairness in time scales people care about, there will be violence.
Compromises are the key tool in preventing violence. Unfortunately, the word itself carries negative connotations in too many languages, making effective compromises less likely.
>If they don't believe that they live in a successful society, or if they believe that the success of the society is not distributed fairly (or in a way that benefits them), violence starts looking attractive.
Especially when the answer to every "well why doesn't it work this way" you could possibly ask seems to come back to "state violence has put its thumb on the scale of society". The government or "the ruling order" or "the system" (whatever you want to call it kind of brought this on itself by taking so much crap under it's umbrella
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