you don't get American capitalism (and unfortunately, this sickness is spreading).

It is completely predicated on growth. Even beyond profitability. As long as you are growing. Under this paradigm, to not be growing at double-digit percentages anually is to be "moving backward" or "shrinking" or "losing".

American capitalism has no concept of steady state. This was fine when we were a frontier country. Growth is great in that sense as it can mask all sorts of mistakes, mismanagement and outright theft (think Enron). Managing a steady-state economy is actually much more difficult. But this is largely what Europe has been doing for decades. They are not a frontier, and haven't been for about a thousand years. There are companies there that have been in business for decades, even centuries, at more or less the same size, same profitability and same income, supporting the same number of employees with vacations and benefits and so on. In the US, these companies would have been scrapped long ago as underperformers, along with the employees (but only after first raiding their pension funds which has been legal here since Reagan).

This model is, of course, not sustainable. And just look at the things corporations have been doing to try to sustain double-digit growth in a near-stead-state country (and without immigration, we would be steady-state or even negative-growth): outsourcing to China, Mexico and India, lower wages for produciton workers here, fewer benefits, less vacation, no pensions (and raiding what was there), lower quality and so on. And, of course, throughout it all senior-management earnings have been going through the roof (even up to 1Billion dollars for life...) even as everyone else is being cut, reduced, moved to part-time and so on. (yeah - what ever happened to trickle-down?).