Bureaucracy is Eating the World

Disclaimer: This is an opinion piece. It is also a long one, because the subject is too tangled to compress without losing the thread. I have tried to look at the matter from different perspectives and include the strongest counter-arguments where I saw them. As this write-up had been in the works for a very long time, some of the referenced data isn’t the absolute latest data available today, which however does not impact the underlying message. As usual, summary at the end. A few weeks ago I sat down with a friend who, after twenty years in a steady job, had decided to start a small business in the European Union. Nothing exotic, just a one-person operation, selling a thing they had been making in their spare time for years and that other people kept asking to buy. By the time we were done, we had identified the trade register filing, the tax office registration, a separate VAT registration with its own threshold rules, the obligation to issue invoices in a specific format, the…