Comment by mnewme
1 day ago
This whole story that Europe suffers from overregulation is just in parts true, and mainly lazy thinking.
In fact there was a study by an American law school that came to the conclusion that the US has more bureaucracy than many European countries…
Recommended read: https://www.andybudd.com/archives/2026/04/the-lazy-myth-that...
You haven’t dealt with German bureaucracy then.
> You haven’t dealt with German bureaucracy then.
‘Europe’ is not substitutable by ‘Germany’: a one state counter-example does not substantiate a disproof of a union. Texas is not representative of how U.S. patent law works. Florida is not representative of how U.S. business regulation works. So, the recent HN post about German incorporation slowness fails, in isolation, to disprove the claim above that the US is more regulated than the EU; you’ll need to make your own case (or relevant citations!) about the EU (or Europe) rather than just Germany to be taken seriously here. Do you argue that “many” is the minority case out of all European countries? Are you evaluating difficulty weighted by GDP? Are you evaluating EU and non-EU together or separately? etc.
Exactly this! People compare to Europe as a whole when convenient and then cherry pick when it is inconvenient
Spoken as a German or as an American?
I don't really find this article persuasive. To pick out a good example of why:
> The debate around chlorinated chicken was never really just about chicken. It became a symbol of something larger: the fear that “market access” would become a polite way of saying, “please lower your food and safety standards so our companies can sell more easily into your market.” You can dismiss that as protectionism if you like. From a European perspective, it often looks like defending standards that citizens broadly trust.
Chemical washing of chicken is a safe and effective way to reduce pathogens. European food agencies agree that it's safe and effective, there's really no dispute about this, and in the US that's the end of the regulatory story. But in Europe the regulators see it as their job to consider esoteric second order effects: if we make it too easy to clean your chicken meat, might that cause you to underinvest in efforts to keep pathogens from getting there in the first place? It might, and the status quo achieves acceptably low rates of foodborne illness, so there's no need to permit innovations in chicken processing.
It's true, I would concede, that regulatory agencies requiring businesses to do stuff in a way that citizens consider normal will produce strong standards that citizens broadly trust.
> But in Europe the regulators see it as their job to consider esoteric second order effects
That’s seems like a thing I want a regulator to do. A regulator making decisions only on first order effects seems doomed to fail.
I have lived both in the US and two European countries. Food quality is not even on the same scale. So much better in Europe, you can’t even compare, no wonder life expectancy is higher.
Europe may get some things wrong, but in comparison to United States on food, they don’t, particularly eggs, chickens and baked goods, America allows to many substitutions for expediency (profit).
> Chemical washing of chicken is a safe and effective way to reduce pathogens.
This is actually somewhat controversial. It definitely messes with standard in vitro bacteria counts. However, there's some evidence that this is more a measurement problem than anything else (for instance https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/may/26/chicken-health...).
Salmonella's particularly problematic here because for many strains the infectious dose is _tiny_, potentially as low as 1000 bacteria.
Mandatory testosterone testing!
At the end of the day people want to impose their morality on on others. Whether it is crazy Christians or leftist eco warriors- don't let them take away your freedom. Keep on buying shit from China.