Yet another example of state capitalism smashing small business
Yet another example of state capitalism smashing small business… From Jeffrey Tucker at the Mises Institute blog:
Last night, a lady from my neighborhood just delivered her last pint of chicken salad to my door. Her chicken salad–made by “The Chicken Salad Chick”–has been all the rage, with everyone in the neighborhood forking over for this stuff. It’s a classic case of a suburban food hysteria.
But she is shutting down, not because of her failures but her success. The Health Department of the County called her home. They were very nice and sweet in a Southern sort of way. But they explained that it is not fair to those who have complied with all the regulations for selling retail that she should be allowed to bake and sell from her domestic kitchen. You have to have industrial ovens. You must comply with all food regulations. You must cook and sell only from an area zoned for commercial purposes. And yes, someone called to complain: not a customer but a competitor who does comply with all these regs.
It’s just fairness right? Well, call it what you want but note that this action was taking for motives having nothing whatever to do with the health of the public. It was driven by a competitor wanting to drive up her costs and therefore hurt her business. The regs are being used to clobber competition — which is precisely why they were created and precisely the way they work in the real world, all civics-texts pieties aside.
The matter is instructive, regardless of what your cognitive framework leads you to call state capitalism — “capitalism”, “socialism”, “corporatism”, “mercantilism” or “fascism”. The centralizing tendency of state intervention in the market to support an unproductive plutocratic oligarchy at the expense of authentically voluntary market relations is the principal economic point of pain. Almost all other misery derives from that.
Those of you who continue to call yourselves “anarcho-capitalists” would be wise to use other labels. Otherwise, you’re throwing away the opportunity to demonstrate to earnest socialists that the phenomenon they refer to as “capitalist accumulation” is a necessarily statist phenomenon deriving from market intervention by the state on behalf of the political class. And since all states are demonstrably inherently oligarchical… well, you hopefully get the picture.
Black and grey market chicken salad? They do it with bread.
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