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I reckon part of it is that the US and other colonies were basically sandboxes where (pre-)capitalist ideas could be build from scratch and deeply enrgained in the collective mindset over time. In Europe it had to be established over a much larger population (or at least one were you have to hold back to a degree with supression) and capitalism faced much more competition and backslash from the people right from the start and resulted in more of a batchwork of different ideas.

At least anecdotally, when I talk to an average European vs US American, what e.g. their views about what restrictions for businesses are acceptable or even desirable, I get very different answers.



I'm sure that's part of it. Another hypothesis I like is that the US was populated to a significant extent by people who, when faced with problems at home, didn't stay and fight to fix them but instead preferred to leave.

In addition to migration patterns that selected implicitly for such folk, this happened internally to the US as part of the movement to colonize ever further west.

Now, there hasn't been anywhere else left to go for a while, but society hasn't really internalised this yet.




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