Not exactly Europe though. All of South America Was influenced through Simon Bolivar with hispanic governance, which focused on limited private ownership and government control of most things. Personal liberty wasn't even on the radar.
South America and the USA gained their independence around the same time, but South America has yet to understand the value of individual liberty, individual responsibility, and the right to exist without government control over your life. South Americans have an incredibly hard time acquiring property with an insane amount of government regulation. Even if they manage to gain the title deed to a property, the next government regime can simply take it away. And you can forget handing anything over to your children in many South American countries. When individuals have no access to capital, and they have no collateral to loan against, they don't have the opportunities that Americans had. South America was mostly run by elites in government with much less freedom or control from individual citizens. This transcended into your dictator tropes..Peron, Che, Somoza, Pinochet, Diaz, Santa Anna, Chavez... and countless others.
So yah it's a crappy place if you love individual freedom, but the income equality never translated to wealth for any of the countries, because wealth isn't created by simply printing money and equalizing everyone's income. That is how you create inflation like in Venezuela. Wealth is created with productivity, which can be achieved either through the whip or through the freedom to produce however much you want and be allowed to keep most of it, no matter how many jealous people want to rob you. I don't prefer the government control of the whip.
America can't have good education because the government runs most of it. It isn't cheap either because teachers are allowed to form labor monopolies so they don't have to be competent or efficient. (almost half of a child's education dollars goes straight to wasteful administrative costs).
California and New York can't have cheap housing because the elites in government operate like South America with hundreds of regulations, bribes, and kickbacks involved in the process of new home construction.
America can't have affordable healthcare because insurance companies and the AMA doctor's union have paid off the government to restrict competition so that the insurance companies can drive the costs up with no fear of cheaper alternatives, and the Hospitals get to dictate exactly how those funds must be spent. Like the education system, healthcare in the USA is mainly run by monopolies.
You might see a few charter schools emerge to make a dent in the problem, but the public teacher's unions are strong enough to either shut them down completely, or restrict them to a tiny fraction of the education market. Similarly, local clinics are constantly suppressed by the power of the AMA labor lobby, and the insurance companies have no choice but to play along, or get their licenses to operate revoked by the state.
