Right, it's funny that the general standard of living in Europe for people in all classes is closer to what the American like to think of themselves, while their country is, in fact, closer to the society of old Old Europe, but that's because of this: the American Way is, like the Soviet Five-Year Plans, a mechanism in which to make people fit, and it's more about the mechanism and those who mange it than about the actual results it produces, at least in all the extent it is pretended and purported to yield... while in Europe (that is, the continent, and from that the Western part), for all their higher degree of regulation and apparent general tightness, there is still an understructure, that of old Old Europe, that has not been deconstructed, and which supplies them with the flexibility the stiff American system, for all the apparent freedom and opportunity, is responsible for all the contradictions and the shortcomings that many Americans perceive, particularly in the judiciary and medical systems.
In short, America is working from total the freedom of possibilities they had in their constitutional era, to a rigid system akin to that of older, well-established powers, like that of Old Europe, following the oldest and simplest rule and objective ever used to build nations and civilizations, namely, oligarchy, while Old Europe is trying to loosen and rejuvenate their structures, and by opening up to all possibilities, but without a definite goal or guide, is rather deintegrating than rebuilding.
In any case, it's funny how Americans can forget about all that and simply retort that your country is Naziland after all, and mine a mere mess open to all extremes, the fascists like the anarchists... that is, without all the decent regulation of the American forms of both fascism and anarchism.