It's easy - and enjoyable - to make fun of Johnny Foreigner

An amusement from France:

Sales of foie gras fell 12 per cent last year and the pandemic has made matters worse. Producers are expecting a 20 per cent drop this year compared with last year. In response, the government has allowed unlimited cut-price offers on foie gras, while outlawing advertisements for the cheap deals.

You may sell at any price you wish but cannot tell anyone about it. The contorted logic continues, as this is a rule that applies only to fois gras.

Other comestibles may not be discounted in this manner:

Retailers were banned from selling more than a quarter of any product at a knockdown rate or at less than 34 per cent off their list price.

The reason why:

The law was designed to ensure “a fair price” for farmers and “healthy, sustainable food accessible for everyone”. It involved a curb on the supermarket promotions that Mr Macron blamed for dragging down prices, leaving a third of French farmers with an income of less than €4,200 a year.

Consumers may not, by law, be made better off in order to protect producers. What larks given the most odd moral economy of Johnny Foreigner, eh?

Except perhaps we shouldn’t laugh at Mr. Foreigner too much. Our own polity is insisting that consumers may not be made better off in order to protect those producers. This is what all that fuss about food standards, chlorinated chicken and so on, concerns. Certain other foreigners can produce food that we may wish to consume. Or not consume, as the taste takes us. We are to be banned by law from making that choice in order to protect domestic farmers, those producers.

The retailers are also restricted in their ability to tell us of sales and offers like Bogofs. The same twisted logic but as it has been for centuries now our absurdities are better than those of the French, aren’t they, entirely and quite, quite, different.

Actual logic would suggest that we pluck the beam from our own eye. Free trade, a free market, in food to the benefit of consumers. For making us consumers out here better off is the entire point of our having an economy in the first place.