You're right that the EU is probably moving too slow on these things. But something is better than nothing.
> But something is better than nothing.
Now I see that selective enforcement is real, and extremely damaging. I no longer support tackling problems that address 1% of a phenomenon when problems that address 20% of the phenomenon exist. Otherwise it is just virtue signaling, letting the real problem continue, and pushing an unrelated agenda against the 1% offender.
Pretty much spot on! And the scary part is that this selective enforcement for virtue signaling works for the public, and works very well. Just look at the many bonkers and useless policies every country had in place in one form or another during the pandemic(besides the medically sane policies obviously).
People see their leaders and authorities doing $SOMETHING, no matter how useless it is but the more extreme and more visible it is the better, and are therefore assured that their government is hard at work and isn't just asleep at the wheel as they though. Then, after the posturing and signaling is complete, everything goes back to the status quo, and the rich and powerful can keep braking the rules like before while some patsy schmuck got a fine as proof to the voting plebs that the system and enforcement works.
Rinse and repeat for every crisis or scandal that impact the image or elections of our leaders.
Pretty much every government ignores human rights abuses in pretty much every field as long as the human rights abuses happen far enough away, no? I would love a huge "no product sold in the EU can have been produced in a way which involves any form of 'human rights abuse'" law, but we know governments well enough to not expect that, right? I don't even know how you'd define "human rights abuses" in a way which prohibits both mistreatment of miners for rare earth minerals and slavery and indentured servitude and underpaid, overworked sweatshop conditions and poorly treated coffee farmers under one definition without being overly broad and hitting unintended fields; coming up with such legislation genuinely sounds like a ton of work with a significant risk of fucking over industries unintentionally.
For the moment, I'll take a trickle of laws which target specific industries rather than nothing. I certainly won't attack legislation which moves us in a good direction for not being the silver bullet "liberate everyone in the world being poorly treated or underpaid" law.
> but we know governments well enough to not expect that, right?
The car market is about the same size as the clothing market, your 20:1 ratio is way off. Allowing the car market to become as bad as the clothing is not a win.