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Gormoyesterday at 7:37 PM6 repliesview on HN

It's funny that the EU pretends not to be a sovereign entity or a state in its own right, but then sets up legal frameworks like this. Even in the US, you can't set up a corporation at the federal level: apart from a handful of entities chartered via special acts of Congress, a business entity must exist under the laws of a particular state.


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skissaneyesterday at 10:08 PM

> Even in the US, you can't set up a corporation at the federal level:

This is only because the drafters of the US constitution didn’t think to list corporations law as an enumerated power of Congress - I don’t think they omitted it out of an ideological conviction, simply because nobody thought of it at the time. That said, given SCOTUS’ expansive reading of the interstate commerce clause, there’s a decent chance SCOTUS would let them get away with a federal corporations law, but they’ve never had the political will to attempt a general federal incorporation law

The drafters of the Australian constitution did list corporations law as a power of the federal government-but they were working over a century later, and they studied the US system intently to try to identify what worked and what mistakes to avoid. However, it took until 1989 for a federal corporations law to be enacted, and then the High Court ruled in 1990 that the new federal corporations law was unconstitutional, because the corporations power in the constitution only authorised federal regulation of existing domestic corporations, not the act of incorporating them - however, this was fixed by a federal-state agreement voluntarily ceding corporations law power to the Commonwealth (this is another innovation the Australian constitution has compared to the US - the ability of the federal level to gain new enumerated powers without constitutional amendment, by the states voluntarily agreeing to cede them)

riffraffyesterday at 9:07 PM

You could setup a European company (SE) for 20 years or so, this is a new kind that solves some of the issues that one had.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Societas_Europaea

layer8yesterday at 8:52 PM

It’s a mix, some competences lie more with the EU, some remain more, or exclusively, with the member states: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competences_of_the_European_Un.... Importantly, foreign policy and defense lies more with the member states. In addition, proposals by the European Commission must be approved by the Council (consisting of executives of all member states) in a qualified majority (at least 55% of member states and representing at least 65% of the total EU population) or in some cases unanimously.

oytisyesterday at 9:46 PM

You can easily hire a person from Ohio to work for your company incorporated in California without having a separate legal entity in Ohio. Not the case in EU.

mrtksnyesterday at 8:52 PM

EU is not a sovereign entity or a state but it needs to be and this is one step in that direction. EU eurocrats worked with the people affected of this and put together a proposal and the elected officials of each member state will vote on this.

Anyway, I don't know about the exact wiring of this but an alternative can be to create a virtual country with its own law, sign a trade agreement with the country to give it full access to the EU market and even some special rights and achieve the same effect of getting rid of the regulations and bureaucracy. These arrangements can be very interesting, like the City of London which is like a country inside London that is actually a corporation. Very weird things are possible.

dmitrygryesterday at 7:39 PM

They surely became a sovereign entity when they started fining member states (who are allegedly sovereign) for attempting to own their own border policy: https://www.hungarianconservative.com/articles/current/migra...

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