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Comment by CaptainZapp | Hacker News Reader

That's where the EU is actually great.

Car manufacturers (notably VW and BMW) where punished with 100s M Euro fines for enforcing that their Italian dealerships do not sell to Swiss customers, even though Switzerland is not part of the EU.

The situation is, of course, exactly the opposite in that Swiss customers profited from cheaper Italian prices.

The EU commission takes a very dim view on attempts to subvert the free market by manufacturers.

This seems exactly the opposite from the US, where big business is protected, but not the customer.

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Switzerland isn't part of the EU, but it does participate in the European Union's "single market." It has entered into a series of trade agreements that make a large portion of EU law applicable in Switzerland in return for participation in the single market: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switzerland%E2%80%93European_Un....

This is no different than the U.S. The federal government has historically cracked down quite strongly when states have attempted to burden interstate commerce.

>> subvert the free market by manufacturers

Whatever people (in this case, manufacturers) do IS free market. Regulation is subversion.

Well, by that token regulation is also the free market, by virtue of regulatory capture, and words cease to mean anything at all.

Fact is, as his high holiness Milton Friedman himself argued, business is not a friend of the free market:

Almost every businessman is in favor of free enterprise for everybody else, but special privilege and special government protection for himself. As a result, they have been a major force in undermining the free enterprise system. Stop kidding yourself into thinking you can use the business community as a way to promote free enterprise. Unfortunately, most of them are not our friends in that respect.

http://www.aei-ideas.org/2013/06/milton-friedman-on-the-diff...

Yes... and then the Swiss voted to keep EU people out of their country...

† Prices are lower, not cheaper.

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