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When The Butter Runs Out in Norway Laugh At Local Food Fans

by | 14th, December 2011

I’M sure you’ve seen this little piece, the Great Butter Famine going on in Norway?

Yes, isn’t it terribly amusing when one of the richest nations in the world runs out of a basic food stuff. There’s got to be some craziness behind it all. And indeed there is.

Norway is one of the very few places with farming policies even more stupid than our own dearly beloved EU. They “protect” their farmers even more than Brussels does. Part of that protection is that there is a quota and then a tax upon the top of the quota on importing butter into the nation.

The reason for this is that they’re all gooey about “locally produced” food, think that farming an icy wasteland is worth forcing everyone to pay through the nose for. Very similar to our various locavores and Greenies who insist that we should all eat only what has been grown within eyesight of where we shit. And yes, if we too had such a system we too would have physical shortages of things just like Norway is.

OK, well, their guts and country, up to them how they run it. But the intended effect, the aim, of those high import duties and low quotas is to make food expensive inside Norway. Which it does: and as anyone who has ever sat through Econ 101 will know, high prices brings forth high supply. Too many people start producing milk and butter, so what’s the solution to that?

Now state officials have cut fees incurred for over-production of milk in Norway in the hopes that will boost milk production and get the raw materials needed for butter-making to local dairy cooperatives like Tine.

Yes, you’ve got to fine the people producing that high priced milk that you deliberately set up the tariffs to make high priced! And once you’ve fined them they will produce less milk meaning you can have a butter shortage.

It really would be just a great deal simpler if they bought their butter from Denmark, just like we do.

 



Posted: 14th, December 2011 | In: Money Comment | TrackBack | Permalink