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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 hig
by bambax 1mo ago
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.
- radicalbyte 1mo agoHaving 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.
- philipallstar 1mo agoLobbyists don't do this. Regulators/lawmakers need to be corrupt and/or incompetent for lobbying to do this.
- contravariant 1mo agoSo lobbyists did do it then?
- teiferer 1mo agoYou 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.
- philipallstar 1mo agoThat 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.
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- teiferer 1mo agoI 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.
- philipallstar 1mo agoPeople don't vote regulators into office.
- teiferer 1mo agoLast 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.
- philipallstar 1mo agoWhere do you live that regulators are part of elected political parties?
- teiferer 1mo ago
- makapuf 1mo agoYou 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.
- philipallstar 1mo agoLobbying 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.
- dolia 1mo agoI 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.
- philipallstar 1mo agoWell, 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.
- lll-o-lll 1mo agoThe 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.
- radicalbyte 1mo agoThe 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).
- philipallstar 1mo ago> 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-vs-harris-fundraising-race-harris-outraised-trump-3-to-1-with-last-pre-election-report https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2024/11/04/trump-v...
- tovej 1mo agoDemocrats 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.
- philipallstar 1mo ago[flagged]
- radicalbyte 1mo agoMight want to take a look at the news channels you're following as none of them describe the Democrats, outside a bit of performative "socially left" things (like keeping the government out of bedrooms - though as a libertarian I don't consider it a "left" issue at all, more a basic freedom).
- worik 1mo ago> 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
- philipallstar 1mo agoI'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.
- cm2012 1mo agoIt'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.
- schubidubiduba 1mo agoIt'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
- danlugo92 1mo agoPeople still in bubbles in the big 2026
- cm2012 1mo agoYou 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.
- worik 1mo agoI find that difficult to believe, having been involved in political campaigning (not in EU or USA). Have you evidence?
- cm2012 1mo agoSure. 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/2024/tables/congressional/ConCand1_2024_24m.pdf https://www.fec.gov/resources/campaign-finance-statistics/20... Further splits here: https://www.fec.gov/resources/campaign-finance-statistics/2024/tables/pac/PAC2_2024_24m.pdf 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.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 1mo agoI'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).
- luke5441 1mo agoIs 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.
- AnssiH 1mo agoI 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.
- bambax 1mo agoThis 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.
- Aerroon 1mo agoYeah, it only took 4 years for them to fix an obvious screw up. Only 4 years. Surely every business can survive that.
- teiferer 1mo agoIndeed, and that's why we need more EU, not less of it.
- badestrand 1mo agoYou 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?
- teiferer 1mo agoIf 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.
- ShadowOfThePit 1mo agoWhat about the argument of these regulations not existing in the first place were it not for the EU?
- dvdkon 1mo agoWithout 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.
- petra 1mo agoLet'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 ?
- nemomarx 1mo agoHow 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.
- petra 1mo agoThe Californian company probably opens their new plant in Missouri, so now it's not exactly a Californian company.
- fakedang 1mo agoThat'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.
- trinix912 1mo agoStandardized 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.
- andai 1mo agoKinda sounds like it would have been cheaper, more profitable, and less of a PITA for you (a European!) to sell in the US?
- jurgenburgen 1mo agoTariffs on, tariffs off. Have you tried turning the White House off and on again?
- W3zzy 1mo agoThatshouldn't be right since there is free mouvement of goods and persons in the EU
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]