Comment by mns

Don’t wait for objections to an obviously dumb rule at all. Save us all the trouble and don’t implement it?

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Simply put, the Eurocrats can't hear us all from up there.

They weren't asking for a "single set of laws". "Single market" however is a pre-existing concept recognized as "one of the EU's greatest achievements" [1], and lacking regulations in providing said market is what their critique was about.

[1] https://single-market-economy.ec.europa.eu/single-market_en

The EU laws apply to every State in the same way and do not have to be rewritten to be transposed, especially for ex-nihilo new taxes like this one.

> Imagine trying to create a single set of laws to apply to all of the countries in North and South America at the same time.

I actually think it would be quite a bit easier than it is to create the EU. There's a lot more broad cultural homogeneity between the countries in the Americas than there is within Europe. Even on the topic of language you've got the vast majority of all peoples speaking some combination of Spanish, English, and Portuguese. And Latin America has a bit more limited geopolitical concerns than Europe does which makes managing some tensions easier than it might otherwise be.

But I'm not sure why you are considering "it's hard to create the EU" to be a defense against complaints or criticism related to the EU itself. Maybe it's hard and it won't work and the criticism is reflecting that and others are pointing out that it's a flawed task to begin with for some number of reasons. For my own part I think it has been a fascinating topic and a remarkable accomplishment of statesmanship to even get the EU to this stage, albeit like anything there are some very valid drawbacks.

“It’s hard to do X under conditions C” is a good explanation for why “X is crappy” but it seems like a poor reason to re-evaluate “X is crappy”. For a small business owner, larger markets with lower barriers to entry are better than smaller markets with fragmented standards.

An explanation for why some markets are smaller and fragmented is interesting academically but it doesn’t change that it’s not worth participating in.

America does it with 50 states

I mean that's what the PPWR directive is already? It's a single set of laws that applies to all member states. They just didn't write any interop so every country has its own system and registration.

If it was just single registration for EU and paying for each kg of plastic or electronics to member states (like you do with VAT already via VAT-OSS) then it wouldn't be such a big deal.

Even if you didn't have any agreement with recycling companies in each member state and you had to pay the highest per-kg fees it would still be manageable for small sellers.

Meanwhile if you want to sell a single circuit board you're looking at several thousand euro in registration fees and several months for processing just to sell legally to 4-5 countries in EU.

This is comical the liberal in their perpetual confused state: "they are doing their very best!", "you couldn't do it better yourself!". The EU primary function is to serve capital interests to protect neoliberalism across the EU at all cost. It's the perpetual shock doctrine, thatcher politics for all, there is no alternative, dead-end, end-of-history, its what you would get when you put the IMF in charge of a continent. Literally everything is falling apart, the fascists scapegoat irrelevant migrants for the mouth breathing median-voter/peasant while the liberals are haplessly groveling at their imperial masters and censure Spain for being an unruly vassal.

Yeah, obviously we wouldn't try to do that. Our laws, cultures, and priorities are wildly different. By this lens, the main problem seems to be that the eu expanded too much and grew too large to actually have a coherent purpose.

They manage to do it for 50 states in the US just fine. It isn’t exactly rocket science. It’s just that individual countries in Europe all feel like unique little snowflakes.