Getting raided can happen to companies of any size, Mullvad comes to mind as an example of a company that's small, European and got raided, but it is incredibly rare. It's hard to overstate how exceptional it is, you need to either be on the police radar with a serious issue, or breaking the tax law considerably, or etc. I think the main reason you see this happen to a lot of American companies is that they expand to Europe, but try to do business the same way they did back home. Both the legal landscape and the moral landscape wrt it are very different in Europe, and trying to willingly evade taxes for example is tended to with a very heavy hand. If I'm not mistaken, that's what's happened to Netflix here: they already got caught evading taxes once, and now there's a suspicion that they're doing it again/still.

A raid is a lot of work and only happens when you know you find something.

For 99,9% of companies, you get audited every 5—25 years by getting a visit from your local tax authority.

Remember: Small/medium companies have comparable companies and you can easily spot the tax dodgers. Or tax dodging is unofficially tolerated to some degree — think restaurants only accepting cash.

Most companies are not as blatantly illegal as Uber..

Large multinational companies are accustomed to openly breaking the law and getting away with it in the USA; when they try to do the same in Europe they are very surprised when the law actually comes after them.

They also raid anyone else they don't like, such as people who run Tor exit nodes... but random small businesses are not in that group.

Maybe this explains why the US is out ahead in GDP, income, and is doing much better pre and post covid than Europe.

It's not so much breaking laws, but unnecessary restrictions and harassment by Europeans states.

The US is business friendly. It's industry friendly. We don't needlessly harass the business of sovereign individuals, and the state apparatus isn't being used as an excuse as to exert power or influence over the population. Not to the same paternalistic extent of Europe.

In Europe the liberal state apparatus that replaced the monarchies are acting an awful lot like the monarchies.

You call a tax fraud investigation "needlessly harassing the business of sovereign individuals?"

You're right, the U.S. is very business and industry friendly, which explains why the American people have been getting poorer and poorer while corporations and their shareholders get richer and richer.

The Average American is getting richer and richer, especially compared to European wage stagnation. I don’t think non-Americans understand how rich middle class americans are.

Only 50% of Americans have Passports. 80% in Europe.

We understand it, because we travel there on vacations.

My last time in America I went to San Francisco, I have not seen a worst place to live in my life, and I have been in Africa.

And other places don’t understand the sheer amount of wealth and freedom other people have. "It costs a lot of money to look this cheap" and San Francisco spends billions to look that cheap btw.

Especially Europe. Europeans don’t even seem to understand how large America is, which is why so few have passports.

America, the land of the free... the place where I could not even walk at night because the streets were full of homless people.

Just carry a gun.

Self-defense is an absolute right unlike other places.

Carrying weapons for self defense was a think people had to do around here in the Middle ages.

And in a free societies the people themselves are the enforcers and protectors. That's why we even have a jury system in place.

In America the people are responsible, not the government or their enlightened bureaucrats.

Who do you think the corporations are? Who do you think the small businesses are? Usurping the free enterprise of the American people and selling it as "freedom" is a sly tactic. Those industries, those corporation, those businesses ARE the American people.

The government can never ever actually represent the people. It cannot act in the best interest of the people.

You know why?

Because it's made of people, and those people can only act in the best interest of themselves. They will never ever act in the best interest of other people, because people physically cannot.

So why are Americans getting "poorer"

Well they're not. This is absolutely false. The American people are getting richer. The American people have a widening wealth gap, but that is far from increasing poverty.

That increasing wealth gap is due to restrictions imposed by enlightened bureaucrats on people getting wealthy, in collusion with the old money old industry extremely wealthy incumbents.

In other words the State apparatus is hijacked by the incumbents that assume their survival is the survival the American people, hence they are "public". That state apparatus will never ever attempt to dismantle the very thing that feeds it.

That's why it hates newcomers and that's why the state apparatus must go.

Take a walk around San Francisco and then say poverty isn't a problem.

Americans have been getting richer and richer according to most recent studies. At the same time, other socialist countries are getting, on average, poorer. I think you may be confusing social inequality with overall wealth.

As an American surrounded by Superfund sites I would like some of these unnecessary restrictions and harassment by the state. The US is so beholden to private interests we can't even repair the roads or mandate healthcare without making it into a market.

Do you know how we won World War 2? We retooled our industrial base because we had strong private sector industries. Do you know how the railroad infrastructure was built? We incentivized private sector industrial scale corporations to build out the railway. Guess how the roads in the country were built/who advocated for them in the first place.

Do you know who the industrialists are? They are the people of the United States. The industry IS the public.

That's why the US has so many millionaires. And that's why Europe is such a failure.

The US IS "beholden to private interests", because the CITIZENRY is itself the "private interests".

In other words that term "beholden to private interests" is in contrast to "beholden to public interest". The later "public" does not mean citizens or the people, but is a dog whistle for the exact opposite, that is the rule by an oligarchic "enlightened bureaucrats" that colludes with industries that has a sad case of mistaken identities, and narcissistically associates its survival, its wellbeing, with the public. When in fact it is the abuser of the public.

The reason the "private" is the "private" is to protect the American citizen from government.

>Do you know how the railroad infrastructure was built?

Abusing the heck out of immigrants and genociding the native people, I'm pretty sure. Also this:

>Construction of the railroad provided many opportunities for financial chicanery, corruption, graft, and bribery. The greatest financial scandal of the 19th century grew out of the railroad's construction. The president of the Union Pacific helped found a construction company, called Credit Mobilier, which allowed investors, including several members of Congress, to grant lucrative construction contracts to themselves, while nearly bankrupting the railroad.

"several members of Congress, to grant lucrative construction contracts"

The difference is that I see that part as the evil. As in who is the "corrupt", "graft" and "bribery" here referring to? It's the government.

>Do you know how we won World War 2?

We as in the Allied forces? The Great Alliance?

I also live within 200 miles of one of our Japanese Internment Camps.

> Do you know how we won World War 2?

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

I don't see any American flag here.

> Lend-Lease. Who do you think they leased from and what do you think they leased?

Did the US won the war alone ? who used the weapons ?

I never said we did it alone did.

But without US industry/industrialists the war would have very much been lost.

Soviet Russia simply would not have survived. That anyone was left to use weapons was because of America.