Those asserts were _created_ by a tiny percent of the population; if they hadn't been allowed to create those assets then they wouldn't exist. Europe is an example of that: it has only 2 companies in the Fortune 500 (500 biggest companies) that were created in the past 20 years, i.e. essentially no tech industry there. Because the policies there make entrepreneurship comparatively quite difficult.
And is life in Europe actually worse than the US as a result? Capitalism has convinced people to think that the end goal of life is creating value. Maybe that isn't the thing society should be optimizing for.
Income-wise difference is significantly less when adjusted for PPP, and (this is from a decade ago but I can't find anything much more recent that goes into comparing countries) Jones and Klenow (2016) says:
> Average Western European living standards appear much closer to those
in the United States (around 85 percent for welfare versus 67 percent for
income) when we take into account Europe’s longer life expectancy, addi-
tional leisure time, and lower inequality.
Jones, Charles I.; Klenow, Peter J. (September 2016). "Beyond GDP? Welfare across Countries and Time". American Economic Review. *106* (9): 2426–2457. https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.20110236. ISSN 0002-8282. S2CID 1352951.
Yes. It is, significantly. More people die every year of heat waves in Europe than gun deaths in the US, and it's not even close. Youth unemployment in many European countries is egregiously high, leading to a sense of malaise and nihilism among the youth. The welfare state is collapsing in on itself and residents are taking that anger out on immigrants across the continent, leading to regressive policies being passed.
The EU is extremely close to entering its own Japan-like "lost decades" if nothing changes very soon.
Those asserts were _created_ by a tiny percent of the population; if they hadn't been allowed to create those assets then they wouldn't exist. Europe is an example of that: it has only 2 companies in the Fortune 500 (500 biggest companies) that were created in the past 20 years, i.e. essentially no tech industry there. Because the policies there make entrepreneurship comparatively quite difficult.