Comment by armcat
8 hours ago
This is a great read and I can extend this argument really to any small business. Tax filing, VAT, bookkeeping, privacy, consumer, workplace and sectoral requirements frequently impose a disproportionately large cost on microbusinesses. EU is more and more split along the enterprise and VC backed line, and everyone in between has disproportionate costs. My barber in Stockholm often complains about this - the amount of money they would need to earn to overcome all these costs is staggering. So they often do lots of gigs on the side.
General view of EU politicians is that working class should be working for big corporations. Running own business is a sin.
The big corporations also don't want people to run small business, because they remove themselves from the job market and cannot be hired / exploited. So they lobby EU FOR regulations that ensure people cannot run business.
>General view of EU politicians is that working class should be working for big corporations
The politicians are protecting the working class from corporations destroying society for profit. Lets not kid ourselves that the EU isn't endlessly praised for "having a backbone". Universal chargers, removable batteries, open app stores, AI data protections...
The thing is that people generally don't understand that everything in the world is tradeoffs rather than the media/internet portrayal of the world being good vs evil.
> Universal chargers, removable batteries, open app stores, AI data protections...
The same "protections" also means that the E.U. has no major AI player at all. It seems like all the E.U. can do is tax and regulate what is invented and produced elsewhere.
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> Running own business is a sin
Shouldn't any wealth creation viewed positively due to tax, not to mention value to consumers/society?
Or is the view that people on average produce more value when employed by a large corporation?
A self employed person can deduct many things used personally from the taxes in Germany as a business expense. An employed person pays shit ton of taxes and the value added tax. So from pre-tax salary you get only 30% for spending. Lol. It’s slavery.
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My barber in Italy just doesn't make me a receipt in exchange for a discount if I pay him cash so he doesn't have to pay taxes. Come on... the cost to operating a small business are usually low/there are tax exceptions, and they most of the time are even not payed at all.
Of course if you are a person that ships 20 packages you don't register a company to do so, nobody will, you just sell them privately (and the exception to sell things privately is quite high, in my country you can do it up to 5000 euros AT YEAR, after that you need to declare the income in your tax declaration but still you don't need to register a company if it's not your main income).
The barber in Stockholm probably wouldn't take cash if you tried ;) Single union, different rules.