Using the exact same reasoning, Churchill would be a dictator, too.

As for taxes, in theory, you could have a unified system that exposes a bunch of knobs for each country to turn as they wish. Some might even set some of them to 0. You can do much better than the current mess. I guess you can also do much worse, especially for the people who've already found their niche tax-wise.

Everything is an even bigger mess when you are a company (not even an employer). E.g. recycling mess mentioned here: https://www.pcengines.ch/recycle.htm

Unlike other solutions, this one takes years or decades, but, on the other hand, it might actually work.

Most rural US problems seem to come from unwillingness to build higher density. Europe has plenty of 5k-20k towns with relatively dense centers that have all the basic services. At the upper end of that range you can even get things like hospitals. And that's in a country with basically no property taxes.

"The average intellectual of the Left believed, for instance, that the war was lost in 1940, that the Germans were bound to overrun Egypt in 1942, that the Japanese would never be driven out of the lands they had conquered, and that the Anglo-American bombing offensive was making no impression on Germany. He could believe these things because his hatred for the British ruling class forbade him to admit that British plans could succeed. There is no limit to the follies that can be swallowed if one is under the influence of feelings of this kind. I have heard it confidently stated, for instance, that the American troops had been brought to Europe not to fight the Germans but to crush an English revolution. One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool. "

-- George Orwell, Notes on Nationalism (1945)

https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...

2. Others were affected by the construction of the pipeline, yet their concerns were brushed aside with nothing better than hand waving and a load of Wandel durch Handel rubbish. To be honest, I'm not sure why anyone east of Germany should care one bit about what German anti-NATO boomers think. To make it crystal clear, national security of Eastern European allies is not something for Germany to trade away -- it never was. We will have our security, if it comes to that, at the cost of German jobs. Not that Germany needs much help with that, what with the genius level planning that went into the Energiewende and all that.

As far as I can tell this opinion is not uncommon, outside of the German speaking bubble.