"Nah, the USA hasn't been laissez-faire in money for a long time. " - I only meant more laisse faire in comparison to Europe, and in a historical sense. I should've been more specific. Note I said slightly more laissez-faire ;-) It's moving further and further in the opposite direction now of course, with the crash of 2008 and ensuring economic upheaval, Obama administration's economic approach vs, Bushs' , Greenspan gone, TARP, bank bailouts etc.
Another interesting European policy decision arising out of the ashes of WWII is the European attitude to privacy of the individual, which is quite different to the American model. The European Data Protection Directive is interesting, in that specific protections are laid in place, versus the American approach which "relies on a combination of legislation, regulation, and self-regulation, rather than overarching governmental regulations" - Wikipedia
It goes onto explain that because individual's personal information was used by Nazi Germany to put people on cattle cars and ship them to concentration camps, Europe was always going to be more concerned about personal privacy than America, which had never gone through such a horrific experience. How could they possibly understand such an attitude, having never lived through the Holocaust? Fascinating stuff, in my opinion.
If that policy's really derived from WWII I daresy they've completely missed the point. The Data Protection Directive wouldn't help if you Europe were to fall under Nazi control again.
It's just a law that says the government can't process the data in certain ways, they still have the data though, and could start mining it by changing the law, or ignoring it.
If they actually cared they wouldn't be gathering this data in the first place. The U.S. (officially) keeps a lot less data on its citizens than the average European country, but that's been changing in the recent decades since the FBI, NSA and others were founded.
Relatively speaking. The first census was taken in 1790, the records being kept about US citizens today are a relatively recent thing compared to that.
Here's a link if you would like to read more about the Tiger: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiger_I#Combat_examples
"Nah, the USA hasn't been laissez-faire in money for a long time. " - I only meant more laisse faire in comparison to Europe, and in a historical sense. I should've been more specific. Note I said slightly more laissez-faire ;-) It's moving further and further in the opposite direction now of course, with the crash of 2008 and ensuring economic upheaval, Obama administration's economic approach vs, Bushs' , Greenspan gone, TARP, bank bailouts etc.
Another interesting European policy decision arising out of the ashes of WWII is the European attitude to privacy of the individual, which is quite different to the American model. The European Data Protection Directive is interesting, in that specific protections are laid in place, versus the American approach which "relies on a combination of legislation, regulation, and self-regulation, rather than overarching governmental regulations" - Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Protection_Directive
It goes onto explain that because individual's personal information was used by Nazi Germany to put people on cattle cars and ship them to concentration camps, Europe was always going to be more concerned about personal privacy than America, which had never gone through such a horrific experience. How could they possibly understand such an attitude, having never lived through the Holocaust? Fascinating stuff, in my opinion.