[Urbane Guerrilla]

False shibboleths both, DanaC, and government-mandated increases of the cost of employing a worker mean it's too expensive to hire anybody! That is the reason European unemployment is thrice that of the American. It won't come down until the government-imposed costs of employment go away.

Free-market rates, undistorted by government mandates, work. And if you want the workers that are worth more, you, as an employer, make them the offer of more. This is how America grew to one quarter of the world's entire economy through the nineteenth century: no interference, plenty of opportunities.

You've been thoroughly conned, DanaC: start making a study of economics. I recommend starting with Hazlitt's Economics In One Lesson, as the clearest introduction to economic basics I've ever heard of, let alone read.

Take a lesson from PM Winston Churchill too: "The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal distribution of benefits. The inherent blessing of socialism is the equal distribution of misery."

You've been told all your life, living in a welfare state, that all you should rightly hope for is your share of the misery. I say there's something better around. You'll have to be the one to make it -- a lot of Yorkshiremen went to America to do just that, and they did it. This is a fundamental tenet of American thinking --the famous "can-do attitude" -- and it is why we do as well as we do. We suggest it works for any human being alive, at any time, in any place.