Monday, November 10, 2008

Our central planners are better than your central planners....

Just been listening to Keith Vaz explaining how the Government should start taking over businesses and telling the owners how to run them. As always there is some stealth to these types of moves and he is using alcohol:

Pub happy hours should be banned and supermarkets stopped from selling alcohol at a loss in order to combat drink-fuelled disorder, MPs have said.
What makes them think that our central planners are any better then than those of the old Soviet Union, Mao's China or Castro's Cuba?

Also, once they start setting prices for businesses will that men those businesses become exempt from competition law (my emphasis)?
Supermarket mega-chains Asda, J Sainsbury and Safeway have pleaded guilty to fixing milk and dairy prices following a probe by the Office of Fair Trading (OFT). The trio will have to pay a total of £116m in fines.

The supermarkets could now face the prospect of follow-on actions by wronged consumers or competitors.

The watchdog said that in setting the fines it had "taken into account information provided by the parties involved in the early resolution discussions which demonstrated the pressures they were under at this time to support dairy farmers."

That pressure was Governement and tabloid pressure on supermarkets to increase what they pay farmers:
"The price initiatives in 2002 and 2003, which were widely and publicly reported at the time, were designed to help British dairy farmers at a time of considerable economic pressure and public debate about whether farmers were getting a fair price for their products," he added.

1 comment:

Mark Wadsworth said...

It's the same sort of Double Think as with pig farmers, see point 2 here.