> In the US you can.

Depends on the state I think. It's not Europe or Japan level.

At my employer it's very difficult to fire people for performance reasons even if as a manager you might want to.

> This is Hacker News, and the pro-business narrative is strong here,

I haven't seen such a narrative in years. Interest rates are too high to do startups unless it's AI after all. HN is mostly the same folk economics content as other forums, where all problems in the world are caused by "profits" accruing to "corporations".

(Mostly problems are caused by other things than that.)