Yep. I’m thinking more and more what “made us great” in the past was the relative youth of our institutions. The longer these things run the further from ideal they tend to become. I would be very much in favor of institutional reform to attempt to continually improve these situations, but of course “institutional reform” is often a cover for fast-track corruption enabling.

I am not sure if this is even correct, The Netherlands as it currently is, is pretty young, but people have been living in Europe for ages. We are one of the countries with the lowest corrupt, we do pay a lot of corrupt nations/people though, but that is a different story.

Dystopian future stories about global corporate rule making governments irrelevant have been around for a long long time - the US is continuing to develop in that direction, but we do have at least a little further to go before we completely get there (even with recent accelerations in some areas.) It is hard for people in the US to make a choice other than support these companies, mom and pop stores are an alternative. In Europe, I am seeing a trend that we are more focusing on EU based alternatives or even better national based alternatives. (or open source, even better imo)