Keeping Business Honest

Rotten Eggs

It is a truism that in the heart of every merchant lurks a craven monopolist.  Given the merest chance monopolist conspiracies will arise in the throat like nauseous bile to hobble competitors and corrupt the market.  We believe strongly that civil courts must be open, accessible, and vigilant to break up such conspiracies--whether upon the unsuspecting customer, or competitors, or upon regulators.  The civil courts need to be vigilant to prosecute with alacrity all forms of fraud, deception, theft, and false weights and measures.  The civil courts must be accessible to plaintiffs and inexpensive. 

Unfortunately, due to the ceaseless flood towards centralised government, none of this is the case.  Civil courts have long since languished into a very weak and expensive and anaemic relation of justice, whilst central government rules and regulations flood websites and exhaust printing presses.  Which suits the monopolists just fine.  They have sufficient funds, industry associates, and cabals of fellow merchants to massage and morph regulations to suit their own interests.  The consumer consequently becomes a well gnawed carcass.

The egg industry in New Zealand is certainly oligopolistic in structure if not virtually monopolistic. 

Egregious Self-Service

Competition is For Other Stiffs, Not Us

Unions are largely about protection--protecting themselves and their jobs against competition.  Unions are pretty happy about competition in general, as long as it is the "other guy" that is having to compete.  When competition lowers food prices and supermarket goodies, unionists approve.  When competition brings a flood of cheap, reasonable quality imports such as furniture, TV's, computers, and mobile phones into the country so that they become affordable, thereby raising living standards generally, unions applaud.

But when labour is overpriced and competition beckons, unionists protest with all the righteous indignation they can muster.  Competition is for the other guy, not our guys.