Does the word 'good' have a different meaning in the US? Your car manufacturers barely manage to compete in the segment protected by the chicken tax tariff... Some do a decent job in luxury EVs.
The banking situation is like an MVP of the real thing. You can't easily get a mortgage in another country, some of the banks can't even serve you in English, etc.
As for taxes, in theory, you could have a unified system that exposes a bunch of knobs for each country to turn as they wish. Some might even set some of them to 0. You can do much better than the current mess. I guess you can also do much worse, especially for the people who've already found their niche tax-wise.
Everything is an even bigger mess when you are a company (not even an employer). E.g. recycling mess mentioned here: https://www.pcengines.ch/recycle.htm
If you listen to someone like Stoltenberg speak, you will find that he is very clear about NATO's commitments. No "each country would decide how much help", that kind of thing comes mostly from the German speaking circles.
Contrary to what some Americans think, Europe is not culturally homogeneous. The countries themselves tend to be, with some exceptions, but they do differ from each other, sometimes in significant ways.
Want to have your mind blown? The systems Americans call single payer are not all the same. And it's not a silver bullet either. The rest of your talking points is a little out of date -- the country most openly diplaying its imperialist mindset and also the one currently engaged in an offensive war is Russia.
It sounds like you might want to look into changing the voting system. The problem with this is that people who have most experience with other systems (immigrants) usually can't vote and have fairly easy exit to another, saner, place. I think Alaska and a few other states have experimented with other voting systems recently. I'm not sure where I've read about it, but there seems to be a subreddit about this: https://old.reddit.com/r/EndFPTP/
Unlike other solutions, this one takes years or decades, but, on the other hand, it might actually work.
I don't get takes like this. What are you even suggesting? More friction on moving from one place to another?
Most rural US problems seem to come from unwillingness to build higher density. Europe has plenty of 5k-20k towns with relatively dense centers that have all the basic services. At the upper end of that range you can even get things like hospitals. And that's in a country with basically no property taxes.
What's more plausible, that the party that routinely blows up warehouses and murders people on NATO soil did it, or the party that has kept Germany safe for more than 70 years did it?
"The average intellectual of the Left believed, for instance, that the war was lost in 1940, that the Germans were bound to overrun Egypt in 1942, that the Japanese would never be driven out of the lands they had conquered, and that the Anglo-American bombing offensive was making no impression on Germany. He could believe these things because his hatred for the British ruling class forbade him to admit that British plans could succeed. There is no limit to the follies that can be swallowed if one is under the influence of feelings of this kind. I have heard it confidently stated, for instance, that the American troops had been brought to Europe not to fight the Germans but to crush an English revolution. One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool. "
1. Why are you taking Russian disinfo at face value?
2. Others were affected by the construction of the pipeline, yet their concerns were brushed aside with nothing better than hand waving and a load of Wandel durch Handel rubbish. To be honest, I'm not sure why anyone east of Germany should care one bit about what German anti-NATO boomers think. To make it crystal clear, national security of Eastern European allies is not something for Germany to trade away -- it never was. We will have our security, if it comes to that, at the cost of German jobs. Not that Germany needs much help with that, what with the genius level planning that went into the Energiewende and all that.
As far as I can tell this opinion is not uncommon, outside of the German speaking bubble.
EU citizens mostly don't think in English at all... In most languages you would call someone who moves abroad an emigrant or something similar. From the point of view of the new country, they are obviously an immigrant. The word for people from poor countries is refugee or "economic migrant".