A close friend of mine is a good example for a case study to exemplify why European socialism attempting to slime its way to the United States will not work here.
She is a native Texan, about 5 generations on one side. Over the last 15 years, she has become an avowed expatriate and currently lives in Sweden. She chides me on the phone, criticizing reasons why America is bad. She is Ahmadinejad with a toothache, and I am General Patton to her. We fight, compromise, and fight again. It is usually like the Secretary of State conversing with Ghadafi on one of his sour days. Somehow, we do manage common ground. She represents all the Americans here that hate their own country yet unlike my friend, do not have the courage to get up and leave. This anti-American thread existed prior to 9-11 and Operation Afghanistan Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom. These three events seem to have been opportunistic events in which to pack into I-hate-America buses worldwide. “Look how much more efficient they are over there in Europe”, these people sigh over here.
I remind her Americans can rally. We can form groups to call to attention grievances with federal and local agencies, and discriminations we feel are warranted. Sometimes they are heard, sometimes they are not. Yet complaints and lawsuits have gotten out of hand, another reason smug Europeans smirk at our system; we shoot ourselves in the foot because our First Amendment can be abused. Look where freedom gets you, Europeans and Middle Easterners goad.
Yet I say that under the American government up to this point, people still have more power than any other place on earth. In England and Sweden, all power is in the hands of the prime minister who is elected by majority party rule. This PM can create and implement laws, with no interference from anyone until, as in England they loose favor in the House of Commons and new elections are held. Agencies comparable to our FDA or EPA in Europe have no constraints by outside interest groups, Congress (Parliament), or judges as they do in America. They are run largely by the discretion of agency heads. You could say this is good for such executives, bad for the people. France has a special court that hears individual grievances and Sweden has an omnibudsman for this, but once a ruling is given that is the end of the story, completely. No more meddling and goings-on by you.
In our country, people used to have much less leeway and standing in courts. To have standing in the Supreme Court now, US citizens must show a direct and adversary effect from whom they are contesting, and surprisingly they are granted standing for even the most petty complaints (at the expense of time and money). In short, your voice does not matter as much in Europe. You might have lovely surroundings, cooperative people, and “efficient” systems, but you as a citizen of your country do not get to protest except by unruly melees and even small groups are a tiny blip on the governmental radar screen.
The media even has limited effects in swaying politics by comparison. You may as well be jumping up and down outside Putin’s house to the east. 
Yet the reason Europeans are more cooperative is because they have always been neutered, like my cat.The emphasis here is the lack of checks and balances in Europe under socialism. Yet this does not seem to matter to many of them. They like – or have accepted governmental control and nanny state methods. Not only my friend, but many other people are amazed at how “efficient” the health care system or safety regulation procedures are in Western Europe. These advocates claim that everything is clean, there are helpful bureaucratic employees, high technology, no severe penalties and fines, and just cooperation over the rainbow. President Obama is another purveyor of this point of view.
They gladly trade this in for any individual choice, or freedom to choose and decide the destiny of one’s own health. They trust the nice people, the professionals, studies done, the inherent way of European socialism and Europe in general. They ignore the stories about individuals put out to pasture for cancer treatment and left to die because the socialist health care system is built unapologetically on who gets to live and die, on selections of only those worth putting time and money into saving.The problem (or beauty) is, America is made up of too many interest groups and fighting factions, not even including Republicans and Democrats. Nothing will every run smoothly, no one will ever settle comfortably into socialist existence as long as the country is a multi-cultural melting pot, one largely constructed from a small group of free thinking, freedom loving individuals over 230 years ago. A national health care system or any centralized run agency will only produce constraint after delay after paranoia of being sued, fired, or reprimanded from the top down. Our complexity boils us in unmoving rules. Our health care system will never run seamlessly and churn out equality, because Americans demand too much from everything and everyone. A government takeover of the health care system will have taxpayers paying for an even larger entity of unfair and unable-to-be-monitored medical bureaucracy. Like clockwork, those who are hit with these injustices, rich or poor, will stand up and make waves across the nation.
It is that our history and ensuing government make up a fabric that is unprecedented and unable to be duplicated anywhere in the world. We are just plain loud. To think that a cookie cutter new socialist system or even a quasi version of socialist-democratic government will stick in America is asking for a basically subdued group of pirates to give up ship. Let sleeping dogs lie – or bark – or suffer the insufferable, hardwired, stem of American resistance: independence, and impassioned moves to keep it.
