The right to sell is no different if you're a farmer, or a doctor

In Europe, it is illegal to sell unusually shaped produce for more than 40 types of vegetables and fruit.

For 20 years, bureaucrats in Brussels have come up with rules like “Class 1 cucumbers must be “practically straight” and their maximum bend must be at a gradient of no more than 1/10”, or “Carrots must not be forked (with more than one root). They must be smooth and regular.”

Farmers have either had to find foreign markets for the more than 40% of their produce that don’t fit inside these rules, or throw it away.

Rule-makers claimed that this protected European consumers from poor quality, but it is hard to argue that a lump on the side of a potato alters its flavour or nutritional value in any way.  In reality, this has been a gross and unfair distortion of competition which – unlikely as it sounds – favoured European producers over imported goods.  The most famous of these is the banana law:  “the thickness of a transverse section of the fruit between the lateral faces and the middle, perpendicular to the longitudinal axis, must be at a minimum of 27mm.” This, along with several pages governing the curvature of the fruit, happens to be the type of banana produced by a small number of farms owned by major European conglomerates, but not by anyone else.

What a relief then that, from 1 July 2009, 36 products have been “deregulated” and consumers will now, for the first time in a generation, get to see what real fresh produce looks like and decide for themselves what they will eat.

Retailers say that prices could drop as much as 40% as vast amounts of new produce can come onto the market.

The markets for freely traded products are circular: for there to be a seller, there must be a buyer.  If it turns out that consumers don’t want oddly shaped vegetables, then retailers will stop selling them and farmers will be back where they started before the rule change.  However, until that product gets to be traded freely, we have no idea what people really want.

Which brings us, by a circuitous route, to the difficulties of labour law.

A reason to promote competition between companies who sell similar products is also because it creates competition between employers for similarly skilled people.  This competition drives up salaries and means that when someone is entirely unhappy with their job, they can quit and take their chances elsewhere.  It may turn out that nobody else wants them either, but that is their problem.  At least they had the opportunity to find out.

When governments insist on creating employment monopolies they not only destroy this competition for skills but also create arbitrary employment rules like the ones which govern European fruit.  South Africa’s striking state doctors currently have the choice of offering their services to the private sector instead.

The government is clearly quite worried about this.

Dr Olive Shisana, CEO of the Human Sciences Research Council, and head of an ANC task team which is outlining government’s new health strategy, has declared it “ridiculous” that only 40% of the country’s doctors are available to treat 85% of the population.

In an interview with the Sunday Times, Dr Shisana declared that “the public health sector is stretched to the point that it requires a share of the resources of the private sector as well.”

In other words, rather than just offering better salaries and competing in the normal way, government prefers to nationalise the industry.  That way they get all the assets of the private sector, along with their staff.