And they have no competition. It would be too political to list these. But, I am sure both sides of the political spectrum can come up with innumerable examples.
Thats a RELIGIOUS statement. The government and politicans are elected by their people. They take decisions that were mandated by their people. If the people mandate something, that's that.
In Anglosphere, where FPTP system prevents the people's will from being reflected in actual politics may be causing such an environment in which what the politicians do and what the people want have little to do with each other. And it does seem to be so.
But in any country with proportional representation, its as it should be: Its the democratic will of the people that something happens.
"The people" does not need to have 'competition'. The people are, well, the society. Proposing that they need 'competition' or their power to be curbed is reactionary.
If a Frenchman doesn't like French laws he can move to Germany and haul all his stuff there (and his pension, etc). But if you don't like the Apple ecosystem anymore, Apple will make it as difficult as possible to move.
The free market isn't the utopia libertarians think it is. You don't get to protest inside Apple, you can't petition for redress of grievances, if Apple terminates your account, you don't get a judge or jury of your Apple peers to rule if it was right or wrong.
A bit offtopic but this is still something I find very lacking in the EU.
For all the good it's brought us, we still have extremely different social security in each country and if you've lived in many EU countries throughout your life it's a complete PITA to reconcile things like pensions. Some countries have state pensions, others only voluntary corp plans.. I have no idea how this will turn out when I retire.
IMO these different systems should at the very least be talking together.
But I think this needs much more priority than the 'one market' benefits for big business they're working on. It's really a mess if you move around in the EU now, it's not at all like in America.
They should fix the voting too: Right now as an expat I can only vote for my home country which has zero bearing on the country I live in :/ And changing nationalities takes 10+ years.
For other stuff like health I don't mind as much (especially as Spain has a much better state health system than the Netherlands' privatised crap :) )
About cooperation between countries; At least the gears are turning, even if it is not somethings that is high on the political agenda. The biggest issue is to have a central database that maps one identity in one country to another. We have not even figured out Inter-country Electronic IDs (via EIDAS) yet, there is no way to even do a manual match of identities between countries using eID. That makes it impossible for you to log on and check your pensions if you work in the wrong country.