How Europe is killing makers and micro-entrepreneurs

Also, for those small cases, why not put responsibility (for any harm) more directly into both the customers and producers? For example, if a producer of a new low-volume product somehow manages to get a lot of waste packaging into the environment, they could be held responsible and pay a fee, or probably who discarded was the consumer, so the consumer in this case should be held responsible. I get that large corporations should be held to higher standards, and take stronger preemptive measures and follow stricter compliance rules.

I think the same should apply for all sorts of regulations, like electrical safety, radio emissions, etc.. If you're designing and selling a small product, you can and should take responsibility for what happens to it (in the case it is found your device bad design/construction itself caused injury, of course). Maybe the only thing you should be obliged to do was put a large sticker like 'WARNING: Prototype-class device. By opening you accept some RISK OF INJURY from device. Return to source if terms not accepted: (...)' -- that is, both you and the consumer should share some responsibility for trying something experimental.

Probably the overwhelming majority are completely harmless low-voltage devices.

In general, I think outcome-based and performance-oriented regulation is something that should be more widespread. Like, there should be in the worst case two options: (1) You follow a strict set of rules and guidelines that dictate how companies in your industry type should operate (specially important for high-risk stuff like nuclear plants, large civilian housing buildings, etc.); (2) You (instead) take increased resposibility for outcomes of your activity (products, devices, etc.), being liable for any damage at an increased rate.

They see tourists and foreigners (even if they're from the EU) as a gigantic target to squeeze and screw as hard as they can. That's what you get when your economy is based on tourism and rich foreigners owning property there: you have to squeeze those hard for it's basically all you have. Officially tourism is "only" about 15% of the GDP but Spain is a service economy and so many of those services revolve around tourism and foreigner owning properties there. Same for the construction sector: they love it when rich tourists have fancy villas built there.

My wife used to own a house there. So did her mom. They sold it all and kissed Spain goodbye once and for all: too disgusted by how the fiscal authorities were treating them.

I won't go on vacation there anymore. Both my wife and my daughter speak spanish and yet we don't plan to go there anymore: she's done giving money to Spain to be seen, in return, as a lemon out of which more juice can be squeezed.

Vote with your feet and you wallet: when a country tries to fuck you, give it the middle finger.

Yes, the point is, pay +€1 for packages from EU to EU to finance all this PPWR circus.