Terence Corcoran: Better start hoarding Pepsi and Frito-Lays

financialpost.com:

As we all know, the Canadian grocery business is a giant national price-gouging cabal of oligopolistic profiteers that rips off consumers and drives food inflation to levels that are causing great pain throughout the economy.

Politicians and leftist theorists such as the expanding economic control machine within the Competition Bureau in Ottawa claim the only way to tame this corporate monster is to impose new controls. In a report last year, the bureau called for a major increase in government intervention, including: a national grocery code of conduct, controls on how grocery chains sign property deals, allowing suppliers to form buying groups, mandating unit pricing and promoting the entry of foreign discount stores.

Never mind that even the Competition Bureau, with all its bureaucratic capacity, could not come up with any real evidence that the grocery giants are driving prices and profits through greedflation. Canadian grocery profits’ margin increases have been “moderate but meaningful.” Grocers, it said, “are earning only modestly more in food gross margin.” The best the bureau could do is claim that while profit margin increases were moderate and modest “even small increases can matter for Canadians.”

What nonsense.

Despite lack of evidence of anti-competitive price gouging and profiteering, the bureau and the government are charging ahead with plans for major government interventions in food retailing, with the code of conduct being at the top of the agenda. It is ironic that while competition theorists complain about possible collusion between corporations, they are all in favour of a conduct code that would essentially set up a formal outline of rules and practices — a form of institutionalized collusion. And