by Jack Lee
There is an old saying, “the price of freedom is eternal vigilance”. To me that means we must be wary of all things big and small that could in any way serve as an impedance to freedom. And that my friends is why I went to our city council tonight.
As you may already know our Mayor, Andy Holcombe, was determined to push “Price fixing” on the citizens of little Chico and call it fair, actually he calls it a “Fair Trade Town policy”. Well, I’ve got news for the Mayor, another old saying says, “A rose by any other name….Is still price fixing!”
The approving council members say it has yet to be determined how this proposal will read if adopted, so tonight was simply a vote to agendize it or not.
The first rebel to be called was me and Iall they wanted to hear was whether I was for or against the so-called “Fair Trade Town” concept, and I said of course I was against it and it looked like I was not going to have a
chance to say much more. At that point my friend and City Councilman Larry Wahl asked to hear my thoughts why I opposed it. I said quite simply that the City Council was over reaching their authority and by more than a tad, as this was an issue that had been addressed by the Sherman Anti-Trust Act in 1890. In fact, fair trade laws were precisely the sort of vertical price fixing the Act sought to prohibit.
There’s nothing new about price fixing, it’s been tried many times and the lessons from history are always the same, it doesn’t work. It eventually harms the free market system and hurts the very people it was intended to help. This is economics 101 and I was somewhat taken aback that I had to be standing in front of our learned Mayor defending a cornerstone of free enterprise, let alone a Constitutional right repeatedly reaffirmed in cases going back over 100 years! He’s the lawyer, he’s our Mayor, he our democratic leader and here I am just a humble citizen defending free trade? Weird. Yet here we are and by the expression on his face he’s not getting it either and neither are the other liberals on the council.
After I presented what I thought was pretty good case to abandon this silly action my friend Mike Wacker spoke. He said with all the Council had on it’s plate, this foolish policy had no business even being considered because they had better things to do. The Council voted 5 to 2 to go right ahead and agendize this price fixing issue for the next meeting. Between now and then the City Attorney has been tasked to review my legal citations, including the Consumer Goods Pricing Act which repealed “price fixing” in 1975 by a vote of Congress.
Just so we’re clear, this is not really a small thing, even if it is adopted as a symbolic gesture. The Fair Trade Town movement is an attempt by leftists to erode a basic tenant of capitalism re-write the law of supply and demand. It’s been done by other communities as a feel good kind of law and this is sending the wrong message to people. I can’t believe the citizens of Chico will stand for that?
The setting of minimum prices on goods, which fair-trade laws legalized, is absolutely un-American. It inhibits entrepreneurs, stifles creative thought, limits productivity, leads to inflation and violates the law of supply and demand. And if that wasn’t enough price fixing is also an elemental form of communism. And as I said earlier the end result is it eventually hurts the very people it was intended to help or at best it simply does nothing for them at all. This is what the Chico City Council would hail as good gesture? Brilliant…and if this passes next month as it looks like it will we should change our name to Chico-grad and wear Astrakhan fur hats like our comrades in Russia.
NOTE: In Great Britain, where the Fair Trade Town concept began it was found that supermarkets profited most from fair trade sales. They charge a premium for fair trade bananas, for example, while a minuscule sliver ends up with the people the movement is designed to help. Philip Oppenheim, Conservative Commentator