In Germany, Ikea is selling (story is in German) a pound of butter for 50 Euro-cents this weekend as some promotional deal. That's roughly slightly half the price what you'd pay in a regular supermarket. Awesome!
Not so fast. The German Farmers' Association (Deutscher Bauernverband) yells that Ikea is "shameless," treating such a precious product with such a disrespect (wanting a lower price) towards the producers.
Usually, I think of such moves in the baptists-and-bootlegger way. If some rent-seeking is pursued, there is a group that overtly preaches the virtues of such a move. They make morally palatable claims. They are the baptists. However, there is the group that covertly monetarily benefits from the rents, namely the bootleggers.
How did the German farmers' lobby manage to be baptist and bootlegger in unison?
Thursday, December 6, 2007
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1 comments:
What's wrong with people advocating their interests? Making use of their autonomy, they freely associate and try to convince a wider audience that a corporate decision is disputable on moral grounds. Others can agree or not. Sounds to me like liberty in action, exercised this time in opposition to "impartial" liberal economic precepts. Still in defense of a plurality of orders of justification... Alex
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