Drive freely? Have you tried driving freely between Austria and Czechia in the last year? Oh, right you can’t. Because the border is closed most of the time because of Covid. You can’t travel freely because they are different countries. And as a Schengen resident you can travel inside the Schengen region freely, but that is not the same as living there and definitely not the same as doing business there. I can travel to Milan from Vienna, but I can’t just start selling pans in Milan. I will have to apply, in Italian, and register, in Italian, with the Italian IRS. All of that is a red-herring.

In the EU you’ll often see labels in stores with the national flag (I put the two character country code) on them and the national after tax price: e.g.

€20 (DE), € 20 (AT), € 21 (FR), € 18(ES), € 20 (IT), € 21 (NL), €21 (BE), € 18 (PT), € 18 (SK)

So with nine little flags the price tag tells over 310 million people the price at checkout, whether that checkout is in Vienna, Milan, Paris, Tarragona, Berlin, Amsterdam, Antwerp, Lisbon or Bratislava. Nothing like that is even close to cost effective in the US.