The thing about Europe: it's the actual land of the free now

> There are few unicorns in Europe, alas, and too little innovation.

There is most definitely innovation in Europe. It just gets bought by the US, who is quick to forget where the technology came from.

As for unicorns and trillion dollars companies... some may say it's a feature, not a bug. It's great to claim to have free speech and competition, but when a few people own a few big monopolies and control the media, is it real? Regulations are not bad.

Exactly, regulation benefits the consumers by allowing for a competitive playing field on innovation, cost and labour.

Deregulate the market and you get the oligopoly US of today (not the "great" version of the 1950s that had regulation which distributed the wealth much more equally).

Regulations in Europe also seem to have had the, I'm assuming completely unintentional, side effect of completely cementing the positions of the top of society in place. And this is nothing new, this actually predates modern democracy in Europe. It's been that way for centuries. In Europe the only time to leave, or join, the ultra-rich is during wars.

That the EU doesn't have unicorns is not an accident of whatever rules you like or dislike, it's entirely by design.

Just leaving this here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Social_Mobility_Index