EU targets veggie stall
Those Europeans sure have their priorities straight when it comes to enforcing laws, don’t they? In the Wall Street Journal, Cassell Bryan-Low writes about the European Union targeting Janet Devers, a 63-year-old vegetable vendor, for the heinous crime of selling in pounds and ounces instead of metric measures;
Ms. Devers, whose stall has been in the family for 60 years, faces 13 criminal charges stemming from not selling her produce by the kilogram and the gram. She stands accused of breaking a European Union-instigated rule that countries must use metric measures to standardize trade. The rest of Europe is metric.
But Brits drink their milk and beer by the pint. On the road they rack up miles. Imperial measurement “is what we know, how we are. Who’s to tell us to change?” said Scott Lomax, a fellow vegetable-stall owner.
Ms. Devers, who pleaded not guilty in a court appearance on Friday, is being lionized for her stand in Britain’s feisty tabloids. If convicted, she could be fined as much as $130,000.
“It’s disgusting,” said Ms. Devers of the charges. “We have knifings. We have killings,” she said. “And they’re taking me to court because I’m selling in pounds and ounces.”
And, equally illegally, in bowls. Ten of the counts against her relate to purveying produce, such as hot Scotch-bonnet peppers, by the bowl.
By the bowl! That scoundrel! Next thing you’ll tell us is that she’s one of those Christians.
Ms. Devers’s trouble with the law began one Thursday this September, when two representatives from the local government council, accompanied by two policemen, came up to her stall and seized her imperial scales. They told Ms. Devers she was using illegal scales and that she wasn’t allowed to weigh in pounds and ounces, she said. “I was furious,” said Ms. Devers, who asked the police officers if the council was allowed to do that, to which they responded that it was.
Around Christmas, a 67-page letter landed in her mail. It outlined 13 criminal charges against her, including one charge of improper pricing of goods and two charges related to using imperial scales. She also faces 10 counts related to selling by the bowl.
“I think it’s so ridiculous,” she said, noting that pricing per bowl is common practice because customers perceive it as good value. “If they’re going to do me for bowls, they have to do the whole country.”
Alan Laing, an official with the local authority that is prosecuting Ms. Devers, said that “making sure traders comply with weights-and-measures legislation is also part of the job.”
So the business owner is complying with her customers’ preferences and the government tells her that her customers are wrong about their preferences. The weights-and-measures legislation is meant for large-scale businesses not for someone who sells by the bowl, for pete’s sake.
But it reminds me of some of the New Deal legislation of the 30’s. In the US Supreme Court case, Wickard v. Filburn (1942), the Supreme Court decided that all of independent farmer Roscoe Filburn’s wheat was part of interstate commerce and he was punished for growing 11.1 acres more wheat than the US government had allotted him – though Filburn claimed the extra wheat was for his family would never leave his farm.
Letting bureaucrats regulate commerce is always a stupid idea.
