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Comment by bambax | Hacker News Reader

Yes. I used to sell objects on Amazon in Europe. You can sell from just one country, but then each sale outside of that country is an "export" that triggers high fees.

For sales to be "local", products need to be stored in warehouses in each country. But that in turn means the owner of said products (the seller) has to be registered for VAT in that country, and submitting annual reports in each country's language.

I went to the trouble of registering in 6 different countries; in some countries, Amazon more or less helps sellers submit reports; in others, they offer to partner with local lawyers.

The result is a mess of reports, injunctions, penalties for late filing, etc. coming to you in Polish, German, Spanish, Hungarian. I eventually gave up.

Europe is not actually a "single market". It's a federated bureaucracy entirely indifferent (or hostile) to small businesses.

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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.

It's comforting to believe that large corporations with the greed of the rich and powerful is what makes these inefficiencies but really it's about a million little political negotiations, primarily driven by voters dislike of change.

It's comforting to believe that actual voters have that kind of political influence over these things, but really it's about a million little talls, primarily driven by lobbyists commanded by big companies

You are about 20 years out of date. Modern politicians get almost all of their funding from small donations, in other words, from passionate partisans who care about culture war issues.

I find that difficult to believe, having been involved in political campaigning (not in EU or USA).

Have you evidence?

Sure. Here is us politician finances from 2024. Note that the vast majority is from individual contributors.

Only 6-8% of us political funding in 2024 came from business-PAC contributions.

https://www.fec.gov/resources/campaign-finance-statistics/20...

Further splits here: https://www.fec.gov/resources/campaign-finance-statistics/20...

There are exceptions to this of course but most politicians answer to voters much much much more than big business.

That's because megadonors don't give to candidates directly? In order to trigger the unlimited campaign finance guaranteed by citizens united, you create a super pac. They can't openly coordinate with the candidate.

If you add in all super PACs and outside spending, it would make up roughly 30-35% of the overall expidenture. That's a lot but super PAC money is worth much less to a campaign compared to donations because it can't be used for core expenses like labor.

People still in bubbles in the big 2026

It’s both. Massive regulation is usually driven by good intentions, populism. Large corporations often don’t mind when it means it would prevent smaller companies from competing with them.

How is that comforting? The phenomenon is entirely negative.

Because if it's just a few evil people making the world bad then that's fixable. The truth that it is it's an extraordinarily complex stew of incentives means its harder to fix.

Sure, cynically, you can use the argument that we can’t just limit the influence of megacorps because the problem is more complex than that. Sure, but limiting them will still help.

Why not do the obvious thing that can still help? There are some simple things we as a people or a conglomeration of peoples can do to curb the enthusiasm for state level corruption. It is doable. It will not solve everything - but surely we can still do it.

> Because if it's just a few evil people making the world bad then that's fixable

The conclusion does not necessarily follow the premises

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

> lawmakers need to be corrupt and/or incompetent for lobbying to do this.

Not really

Lobbyists get to talk into the ears of the powerful. It is literally their job. They make very sensible arguments for their point of view. So it seems very sensible, for the legislators, to make laws that aid the powerful and impede the weak.

The legislators are very busy with pressures from all sides. The cognitive load of considering views that you do not hear is enormous. It is not "incompetent or corrupt" to fail.

The system has the corruption baked in. It is one of the mechanisms, of many, that wealth and power concentrate in "democracies "

I have seen this process from the inside, good people making terrible decisions

I'm sorry they're so busy, but everyone's busy. Not everyone gets to drag money out of people on threat of jail, not have to pay any corporation tax on it, and spend that money on offices and salaries, do a bad job, and have everyone solely blame other people for their failings.

It's like if a judge blamed one side's legal representative for their terrible decisions. The legal representative is not paid to be neutral. They're paid to represent their client. The judge is paid to be neutral.

You need lobbyists to pull on one side and the general population to be too uninformed or too non-caring to not pull enough in the other direction.

That removes the culpability again from the people being lobbied, who are for paid by mandatory taxes, so they don't have to win work - their only job is expertise and honesty.

I don't think it does. Of course they are culpable, that's the whole point.

Them being in that position of power is not god given though, nor set in stone. Replacing them is a single election away. Still, people keep voting for them. So the ultimate responsibility is with the people who keep voting them into office.

People don't vote regulators into office.

Last time I checked, regulators are part of governments which tend to be confirmed in one way or another in democracies.

Different story on non-democratic forms of government. There the hate is justified. But just complaining about regulators relieves those in power (the voting populace) of their responsibilities. Tempting (and convenient) though for everybody part of that populace.

Where do you live that regulators are part of elected political parties?

Elected representatives decide who is in charge. For example, in many countries they elect the government. To which the secretary of housing belongs which decides how housing policy is executed which is implemented by the bureaucrats in that department. It's all rooted in the democratic will, albeit some processes are slow to change (which is a feature too so that a crazy person can't trash your country too bad before you have a chance to course correct at the next election). If it were not then you would not be living in a democracy.

Though it seems we are going in circles since the way you phrased it indicates that you are unwilling to even engage with my argument. Nobody claimed that the regulator is in the political party, (except for one-party states perhaps which are notoriously undemocratic).

So, I'll disengage.

I think we agree then that given their eternal, apolitical nature, replacing regulators is not "an election away", even if people weren't already voting on a vast array of different issues and thus no one could determine from a vote that a particular regulator needed replacing.

You need both, and both are responsible for the current state.

To stop this, you need to try to stop both until one doesn't exists.

Lobbying is fine, though. Lobbying isn't bribery, although sometimes it probably looks like it. Lobbying is also an industry saying "please don't kill us; here's why that thing will kill us". The people making the decisions have the power (hence lobbyists need to exist) and they need to be better.

The revolving door between politician to made man (lobbyist) seems like a bit of a problem, no? These poor ex-politicians/staffers need to earn those mil+ salaries or they couldn’t effectively save these poor industries from demise? Perhaps the politician being asked to go easy on the regulations is potentially influenced by the ex-politicians rather lucrative position?

Corruption does not need to be overt to be destructive. It’s absolutely pervasive.

I will treat this comment charitably and just say that it's yet another case of "definition of X sounds good, so X can't be bad". I believe in reality it's less about "please don't kill us" and more about getting officials to set up the "pleas profit us" situation. Yes, money don't change hands in an office, so it's TECHNICALLY not a bribery.

Well, unlike regulators, companies die without profit. So they do indeed need profit. Smaller companies might want a system currently tilted against them to be changed. Larger companies might spend a fortune on regulation-following that has harmful outcomes, e.g. raising prices, for no benefit. Both of those motivations sound reasonable, and both getting their way may result in more profit for them. There's nothing wrong with profit.

The only thing that can possibly be bad is the regulation-writer, or the regulation enforcer, behaving incompetently and/or corruptly, who decides or enforces bad rules.

So lobbyists did do it then?

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).

> 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.

You need to be mad to think it's the right wing parties in the US who get the most funding. E.g. [0]

> The Biden—now Harris—campaign committee raised $997.2 million and Trump’s campaign committee raised $388 million in total between Jan. 2023 and Oct. 16, 2024, the most recent date for which Federal Election Commission filings are available

[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2024/11/04/trump-v...

Democrats are also right wing. A liberal is on the right.

The DSA is the closest to a left wing party you have in the US. They would be center left in northern european countries.

The two main US parties are firmly right wing, although the Democrats do have a small number of centralist (like Bernie) and centre-left people (though I dunno if any are actually in the Congress).

I'm surprised that was necessary. A single look at the EU website leaves no doubt that the EU is perfectly capable to create a bureaucratic nightmare all by itself (and incapable not to even if it tried).

Is that with the One-Stop-Shop regulation or was that before that?

If it was before than, then the EU recognized the problem and implemented a fix for it.

Yeah, it only took 4 years for them to fix an obvious screw up. Only 4 years. Surely every business can survive that.

I don't think any EU One-stop-shop scheme covers "local" goods sales in other EU member states yet, i.e. an EU company has to register in all EU countries they hold stock in.

That is changing with the Single VAT Registration (SVR) legislation, effective in 2028.

This was 2017-2021. Not sure if One-Stop-Shop covers this as it mentions "cross-border sales" and the problem with Amazon fulfillment and storage was to make all sales local (not cross-border). But maybe it does cover it. I don't know.

Indeed, and that's why we need more EU, not less of it.

You mean, it's good to have _even more_ bad regulations?

Or rather, if a little bit of X is bad, why would you want more of X?

If you look at what I responded to then you see that it was about every country having their own rules. "More EU" would mean harmonizing them in the sense that they are all the same and you'd have a single regulatory body.

I don't see how less EU would make this particular problem any easier. It would certainly give you an even harder time to deal with 20+ states that all impose import bureaucracy. That's exactly what the EU was founded to solve, but the menber states are populisting against it, not unlike your comment.

What about the argument of these regulations not existing in the first place were it not for the EU?

Without the EU you wouldn't have a single set of annoying overly-bureaucratic bloc-wide regulation for trade between member states, you'd have a bunch of bilateral agreements between individual countries. You might not be paying a new tax to the EU, but instead you'd pay much more for your postal service to file customs paperwork based on declarations you'd have to write. And I'd guess countries would still want you to have a local representative for a bunch of things, not to mention compliance with tens of slightly-different safety standards (think CE).

Maybe it wouldn't be that much worse, but certainly not better than what we have today.

The EU existed for a long time now and you could replace all of this with bilateral organisations focused on narrow topics, rather than a bureaucratic body with an open agenda and no real checks and balances.

You think without EU there would be no regulations and everything would be free for all? You must be young or don't remember pre-EU times.

In CS terms, the EU turned an O(n^2) problem, bilateral agreements, into an O(n) problem, everybody trying to get their view into a single body. The advantages should be obvious to anybody knowing O notation.

Again, not to say EU doesn't have problems. But dismantling the EU is not the solution. Improving it is.

Many of the regulations focused on climate change and sustainability wouldn't exist.

Now, of course, it's extremely hard to logically argue against these. But that doesn't mean they aren't extremely annoying to deal with at times.

I never understand this argument. The same logic would suggest that things like the GPL, CNCF, OCI etc. are somehow harmful when, objectively, it's the opposite. Standardisation and conformity lead to much larger and more efficient ecosystems. Why should it not be the same for the EU?

As in the UK, where we've since gotten rid of all the regulation and live in a halcyon utopia.

Kinda sounds like it would have been cheaper, more profitable, and less of a PITA for you (a European!) to sell in the US?

Tariffs on, tariffs off. Have you tried turning the White House off and on again?

Let's say I'm a German small business owner.

Tomorrow Europe becomes a single market. How do I compete with a similar business but from a country where business costs are significantly lower ?

How does a Californian company compete with a company in Missouri that has lower labor costs and less overhead/ regulation?

They seem to manage this just fine, but it's a pretty similar scenario. You could also push for standardized business costs and regulations eu wide ofc to help.

Standardized costs would just hurt the poorer members more. You’re underestimating the economical difference between EU member states. It’s more like if Californian businesses had to compete with Mexican in a single market, and Mexicans would be paying Californian prices with Mexican wages in the end.

The Californian company probably opens their new plant in Missouri, so now it's not exactly a Californian company.

That's the entire point - the Californian company leaves the higher-value R&D jobs in California, while it outsources the lower-value but still necessary manufacturing jobs/data warehousing jobs to Missouri. Both places benefit, because ultimately the union benefits as a whole from the distribution of productivity.

If you concentrated all manufacturing around just a few spots, you end up in a situation like India - inland states with resources get stripped of their resources while all the companies are based in coastal metropolises with port facilities.

One could also go the other way, like China, and let the states compete between themselves for manufacturing prowess, but you need a central planning committee to ensure that the competing provinces still coordinate and work to complement each other. Easier in China, not so much in the EU.

The EU single market is a sorry joke.

You boast about the superior quality of german manufacturing. Or move your manufacturing to eastern Germany where costs are lower.

If you are in Munich, how do you compete with someone from Magdeburg?

Also, quite a lot of German business costs are a self-inflicted wound (too much bureaucracy). Maybe taper down the endless paper war a bit, and throw away the fax machines.

Service in the local language, quick delivery, a local place where people can actually come by to buy or pick up things.

You specialize in things that are more difficult to make in poorer countries - you use your advantages they use theirs. Afterall this is what happened to a lot of Polish industry after we got our EU membership - it died under pressure of already developed competition from countries like Germany.

You don't and that's by design.

Thatshouldn't be right since there is free mouvement of goods and persons in the EU

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