Taxes have the additional upside of leading to fewer stupid consequences.
A lot of the EU bans means if you're designing some kind of e.g. medical life-saving device of which there will be a few dozen units produced total, you can't do a whole bunch of things designed to make consumer devices better. The laws are on the surface reasonable, but they fail in corner cases.
Corner cases sometimes go to be important. Housing in the US is a big one. Building codes don't allow experimentation.
Charge me a grand for using lead, the wrong connector, or whatever, but please don't ban me.