A Blueprint for European Tech

A 28th regime doesn't replace 27 systems — it adds one more, and companies picking the lightest rulebook could use it to sidestep national labor, tax, and creditor protections. Europe has tried before: the Societas Europaea ended up bureaucratic and little-used.

Deferring tax to sale lets equity-holders postpone tax for years while salaried workers pay every month, and it costs treasuries near-term revenue. Options also shift risk onto employees, who tend to overvalue illiquid paper.

Easier discharge makes credit more expensive for everyone, because lenders price in how easy it is to walk away — and generous regimes can invite strategic, serial failure at creditors' expense.

Capital gains exemptions flow overwhelmingly to people who are already wealthy, and the US version is regularly criticized as a stackable loophole. Evidence is mixed on whether such breaks create investment or just reward deals that would have happened anyway.

A real union means member states surrendering control over national exchanges, insolvency, and parts of tax law — competences that are national for democratic reasons. And steering household savings into markets moves risk onto ordinary savers.

Tax-advantaged accounts mostly benefit people with money to spare — Sweden's ISK is often called regressive — and nudging households into markets ties retirements to crashes. Deposits, for all their low returns, fund banks' local lending.

The transition is brutal: one generation must pay current retirees and save for itself at the same time. Funded pensions also shift market risk onto workers — America's 401(k) is nobody's idea of perfect — and housing's tax breaks are politically untouchable.

Country-of-origin rules triggered one of the EU's biggest fights once before (the Bolkestein directive), because they can set off a race to the bottom: firms domicile where standards are laxest and undercut local labor and consumer protections.

New nuclear in Europe has a record of decade-long delays and huge overruns (Flamanville, Olkiluoto), and faster permitting can mean steamrolling local communities and environmental review that exist for good reasons.

GDPR and the AI Act export European standards worldwide — the "Brussels effect" — and protect rights that markets underprice. Lighter tiers for small firms also create thresholds companies avoid growing past, concentrating harm in the least-regulated tier.

Governments are poor at picking winners: set-asides can breed grant-dependent firms that never commercialize (America's "SBIR mills"), invite gaming, and steer money to the well-connected rather than the best product.

A continental talent magnet can drain skilled people from poorer member states and from the developing countries that trained them — and voters consistently want immigration decided nationally, where they can hold someone accountable for it.

Space is the cheapest constraint on European tech — capital, stock options, and fragmented markets bind far harder. The garage story is half-myth too (Apple's founders had backing, and Wozniak calls the tale exaggerated), and no 3D printer manufactures the risk appetite that actually makes founders.

Since Brexit, English is the native language of barely 1% of EU citizens, and multilingualism is a treaty-protected value. Making English official privileges fluent elites over everyone else — and courts working in a foreign language raise real due-process concerns.

Joint procurement means ceding sovereignty over security decisions and national defense jobs to shared institutions — and a common platform is a common point of failure. Some duplication buys resilience and keeps competitive pressure on suppliers.