US per capita gdp has been higher than Europe since 1960, and the gap has steadily widened: https://m.statisticstimes.com/economy/united-states-vs-eu-ec...

I'm aware, and I'm not contesting this, but this is besides the point. What I'm getting at is that Walter seems to think that prosperity has a 1 to 1 correlation to market freedom. If the GDP of the US started diverging farther away from the EU at a greater rate than prior to the GFC, then to his way of thinking, this must have something to do with how the EU limited market freedom following the GFC.

One problem is you cannot fire people in the EU. This makes for companies being very slow to hire, and inefficient allocation of workers to jobs.

Free markets are chaotic, and are constantly reallocating resources from less efficient uses to more efficient uses.

Regulations that impede that make for lower prosperity.

But those laws have only got closer to the US ones since the 2008 crisis, and yet measures of productivity have diverged negatively in the EU.

How does your theory account for this?

There are many differences in the EU vs US that may account for differences of wealth. Singling out how easy it is to fire workers seems ideological.