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Having 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.
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It'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.
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It'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
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You are about 20 years out of date.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.
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I find that difficult to believe, having been involved in political campaigning (not in EU or USA).

Have you evidence?

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Sure. 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/20...

Further splits here: 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.

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People still in bubbles in the big 2026
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How is that comforting? The phenomenon is entirely negative.
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Because if it's just a few evil people making the world bad then that's fixable. The truth that it is it's an extraordinarily complex stew of incentives means its harder to fix.
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Sure, cynically, you can use the argument that we can’t just limit the influence of megacorps because the problem is more complex than that. Sure, but limiting them will still help.

Why not do the obvious thing that can still help? There are some simple things we as a people or a conglomeration of peoples can do to curb the enthusiasm for state level corruption. It is doable. It will not solve everything - but surely we can still do it.

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> Because if it's just a few evil people making the world bad then that's fixable

The conclusion does not necessarily follow the premises

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Lobbyists don't do this. Regulators/lawmakers need to be corrupt and/or incompetent for lobbying to do this.
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> 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

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You 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.
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That 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.
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You 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.

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The 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).

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> 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-v...

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So lobbyists did do it then?
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Is 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.

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Yeah, it only took 4 years for them to fix an obvious screw up. Only 4 years. Surely every business can survive that.
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I 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.

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This 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.
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Kinda sounds like it would have been cheaper, more profitable, and less of a PITA for you (a European!) to sell in the US?
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Let'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 ?

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You boast about the superior quality of german manufacturing. Or move your manufacturing to eastern Germany where costs are lower.
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How 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.

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Standardized 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.
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The Californian company probably opens their new plant in Missouri, so now it's not exactly a Californian company.
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That'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.

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You specialize in things that are more difficult to make in poorer countries - you use your advantages they use theirs. Afterall this is what happened to a lot of Polish industry after we got our EU membership - it died under pressure of already developed competition from countries like Germany.
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You don't and that's by design.
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Indeed, and that's why we need more EU, not less of it.
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