The point is that it's not insane to not have omniscient awareness of all laws in 50 states. It's tough running a very small business. If someone doesn't have enough funding to hire a team of lawyers, should they just fuck off and never do business anywhere? Your answer seems to be "yes".
You also completely ignored my point on the legal uncertainty factors. Businesses break laws every day that are just not enforced. Even a lawyer or accountant is occasionally blindsided by a state or federal authority choosing to selectively apply a law.
My sympathies lie with the small business owner here. It's very difficult to make sure that you've got every angle covered at all times, especially at the scale he's running at.
"Small business that wants to behave like large business"
You mean, exist in the 21st century and sell or conduct any kind of business online? Is that a big business?
It's a well recognized fact that legal and accounting complexity, aka red tape, is an inhibitor of small business growth. Derisively sneering at anyone who doesn't want to do the "necessary work" or "behave" is a troll opinion, and not particularly rational.
No, I mean doing business in 50 different states, or, as mentioned higher up in this thread, >50 different countries.
Any business that has ever tried to do something at that scale at any point in human history needed to deal with compliance in all of them. Just because Stripe or the Apple Store provides payment processing as a service doesn't mean that you can just shrug your shoulders, and claim that none of the other regional distinctions and local laws apply to you.
> Derisively sneering at anyone who doesn't want to do the "necessary work" or "behave" is a troll opinion, and not particularly rational.
Claiming that the law doesn't apply to you because you're a small business and you can't be bothered to follow it what isn't particularly rational, here. If you think this is an excessive burden, you should work to invest more power in the federal government, or in international unions like the EU.
You don't just get to do a run-around of sovereignty because you're a foreigner and it's a lot of work.
While I believe that the point about doing business in other countries is valid, we aren't talking about foreigners in this thread. We're talking about someone in state A that wants to do business in state B under the general assumption that they won't be blindsided by policies being vastly different between the two. I sympathize because I have been blindsided in that way before -- 3 years after making a decision, my accountant informed me that an obscure (federal, in this case) tax requirement existed that I didn't know about, hadn't known to ask about, had never heard about from a lawyer, the accountant or anyone else, and had absolutely massive fines associated with it.
Basically everything you've written is dripping with contempt for anyone who gets similarly blindsided, and you're making every effort to strawman and twist the message. Nobody, not me and not the guy writing this article, says that the law "doesn't apply" to us. Most people starting a business have a deep desire to follow the law as well as possible, because they don't want to run into future difficulties. But again, it's difficult to check all the boxes.
I wonder why you're so contemptuous, but it's kind of a moot point. Most people understand that the tax code complex, and understand that it would be better for small businesses if they were not so complex.
You also completely ignored my point on the legal uncertainty factors. Businesses break laws every day that are just not enforced. Even a lawyer or accountant is occasionally blindsided by a state or federal authority choosing to selectively apply a law.
My sympathies lie with the small business owner here. It's very difficult to make sure that you've got every angle covered at all times, especially at the scale he's running at.