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How Europe is killing makers and micro-entrepreneurs

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Re: How Europe is killing makers and micro-entrepreneurs

#371

Post by veeti »

akie wrote: post #294
formerly_proven wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's yet another EU regulation that requires a rep for each EU country or you're not allowed to do business. EU single market is a bad joke at this point.

[flagged]

They weren't asking for a "single set of laws". "Single market" however is a pre-existing concept recognized as "one of the EU's greatest achievements" [1], and lacking regulations in providing said market is what their critique was about.

[1] https://single-market-economy.ec.europa.eu/single-market_en

Re: How Europe is killing makers and micro-entrepreneurs

#372

Post by radicalbyte »

philipallstar wrote: post #284
radicalbyte wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having worked on the inside: this is by design. You know for 100% that Pepsico and Coca Cola unleashed an army of lobbyists to make sure the laws were written in a way where the single market only worked for large business.

Lobbyists don't do this. Regulators/lawmakers need to be corrupt and/or incompetent for lobbying to do this.

The lawmakers are: in the EU you have a block of right-wing parties. The large part are funded by large companies and make laws which favour them. Same thing as in the US.

There are other right-wing (and left-wing) blocks who are funded by the Kremlin and Kremlin-supporters who just try to break things.

At the EC they're not corrupt, they try their best, but they're often given bad advice and are themselves not experts. And their power is limited (they can nudge but not push).

Re: How Europe is killing makers and micro-entrepreneurs

#373

Post by lyu07282 »

akie wrote: post #294
formerly_proven wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's yet another EU regulation that requires a rep for each EU country or you're not allowed to do business. EU single market is a bad joke at this point.

[flagged]

This is comical the liberal in their perpetual confused state: "they are doing their very best!", "you couldn't do it better yourself!". The EU primary function is to serve capital interests to protect neoliberalism across the EU at all cost. It's the perpetual shock doctrine, thatcher politics for all, there is no alternative, dead-end, end-of-history, its what you would get when you put the IMF in charge of a continent. Literally everything is falling apart, the fascists scapegoat irrelevant migrants for the mouth breathing median-voter/peasant while the liberals are haplessly groveling at their imperial masters and censure Spain for being an unruly vassal.

Re: How Europe is killing makers and micro-entrepreneurs

#374

Post by bogdan »

matt-p wrote: post #189
mytailorisrich wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The UK tends to be much more sensible than the EU and the main EU countries (France, Germany, Italy).

I agree, though it's not a very difficult challenge. There's still some nonsense here too like for example the TV License

The tv license is a bad example and it's in many ways better than in Germany or France. In the UK you can declare you do not watch any national tv and you forego the tax. No such luxury in Germany where as far as I know you can't avoid it. In France it's funded through vat and of course it's priced in so everyone pays anyway.

Re: How Europe is killing makers and micro-entrepreneurs

#375

Post by arjie »

Kudos wrote: post #239

Anti-EU regulation sentiment really seems to have an uptick in line with widespread availability of LLMs. The EU isn't perfect, but the catastrophising I read feels mostly like astro-turfing attempts at destabilisation. It's probably more easily noticed from inside the EU.

Everyone likes to think “it’s the bots” or whatever but GDPR came before LLMs and the reaction to that was the same. I think you’re probably seeing just the effect of a bunch of Americans on an American site in awe at the legal barriers in place in the EU.

Re: How Europe is killing makers and micro-entrepreneurs

#376

Post by dudul »

tengwar2 wrote: post #299
HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dunno about that. I live in the US. I can start a small business today and the only thing I'd have to do differently is file an additional form on my taxes next year. Yes, that's a simplification that doesn't apply to every situation, but it is still completely accurate.

That's pretty much the situation in the UK if you are a sole trader. If you set up a limited liability company, that's a separate entity and has its own tax reporting requirement, but nothing onerous. I am a sole trader, and manage a small company separately from that. One thing I have heard of in the USA is the need for a "business licence". I'm not sure what that is or whether it applies to all businesses, so I'm n…

> One thing I have heard of in the USA is the need for a "business licence"

Where have you heard about that? Because there is no concept of universal business license.

Re: How Europe is killing makers and micro-entrepreneurs

#377

Post by xyzelement »

EU has a double-whammy problem that the average citizen is old, and the more ambitious youth has moved to London, Switzerland, or the US.

So those who remain are statistically too old or non-ambitious to think regulatory friction applies to them, and they are right.

Re: How Europe is killing makers and micro-entrepreneurs

#378

Post by antiloper »

mrtksn wrote: post #354
antiloper wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's always like this, EU is in urgent need of becoming a country in some form and local government deal with local stuff only. The lesson is the opposite: The EU needs LESS power, not more. If the member states didn't have a cartel to tyrannize their collective population, this regulation could never have happened. Any single country that would try to enforce this would be on its own.

Nope, less power means the current situation will be the default as each country by default will have their own body and rules to govern instead of one rule and one body that handles the whole continent. Unlike what you appear to believe Europeans are not some libertarian captured by the EU socialist, most europeans do want less wasteful and less harmful packaging.

Do most Europeans want all of their E-commerce to be only handled by American and Chinese megacorporations without local players? Because that is the effect of this regulation. Instead of a SME shipping a cardboard box, it will be Amazon or Temu.

Re: How Europe is killing makers and micro-entrepreneurs

#379

Post by a34729t »

sajithdilshan wrote: post #11

Sometimes I wonder if the lawmakers in EU are brain dead. The whole point of economic union is that free movement of goods without custom tax and this new rule is practically a custom tax for each country.

The practical purpose of the EU is exactly what it appears to be: Jobs for bureaucrats and politicians.

Re: How Europe is killing makers and micro-entrepreneurs

#380

Post by iknowstuff »

cloudie78 wrote: post #198
yardie wrote: post #29

One of the biggest problems that I have in the EU is that it's almost federated. EU will pass laws, countries will adopt those laws, but you end up with 20-24 different versions of those laws. With some countries being strict or lenient about the law that everyone agreed to. And a lot it is written from the perspective that large corporations are the only ones who do business throughout the EU. It's completely missed…

Ah yes, let’s give the EU and its undemocratic system in which policy formation is heavily filtered through a relatively narrow professional political class, ordinary voters have weak or almost no direct control over major policy choices, dissent encounters administrative/economic punishment, and central institutions possess and use powerful financial means to discipline peripheral governments should have even more c…

US House term is 2 years, European Parliament is 5 years. The latter is actually proportional at least but you can see how they’d only feel pressure every so often
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