Quote:
Originally Posted by Bertolt
Isn't it time we had a European Amazon shop with all the stuff that gets shipped from Luxemburg available to all Europeans at the same price regardless of whether its delivered by wifi, the post office or pigeons? What ever happened to the Common Market/Marche Commun etc? Amazon make life really difficult for Europeans to buy things from other EU countries and the men in suits in Brussels and Strasbourg have done sweet f a to help. Problem is we don't all spend all our lives in one EU country. When I go home to the UK from Spain, the plane is full of UK pensioners who live in Spain and young Spaniards who work in the UK. We all speak several languages but can only buy books and movies in the language we speak and understand worst!
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The way I understand it the common market simply means no tariffs or added paperwork on stuff moving within the EU. It does not imply identical tax regimes on products or identical business climates.
You don't get that even in the US, which is a single nation with a common set of federal laws including prohibition on hampering interstate commerce. We still have thousands of different tax rates and business climates. Most are friendlier than the EU baseline but there are enough variations to impact where businesses setup shop and how they do business.
Two examples:
Tesla motors sells its advanced electric cars direct without relying on middlemen yet in some states it is illegal for auto manufacturers (and only auto manufacturers) to sell direct. So if you live in one of those states, you have to buy your Tesla car out of state and pay the sales tax elsewhere.
California's population and economy has boomed over the past 50 years but they have not allowed the construction of new power plants for decades. Nobody wants a power plant anywhere near their city but everybody needs power. So the local utilities are forced to buy electricity from out of state, from as far away as Texas, under long term high priced contracts. At times when electricity prices drop elsewhere, their prices remain high and provide an incentive for businesses to move out of state or never move in. (Tesla builds their cars in California and was looking to build a "Gigafactory", thousands of jobs and billions of dollars worth of automotive batteries, and ended up in Nevada instead because they got a better deal and less hassles.)
On paper it is easy to imagine simple, uniform rules for everybody but in democracies people burden themselves with all sorts of "unnecessary" handicaps either as side effects of what they think are vital concerns or through inattention to what their politicians do.
Never underestinate the power of human short-sightedness or crooked politicians.