Submitted by CARPE DIEM

Chain stores have been disliked for decades, at both local and national levels. Taking advantage of economies of scale that lower their costs of doing business, chain stores are able to charge lower prices than smaller independent stores, and therefore attract customers away from their higher-cost competitors.

The economics of this is certainly not too “complex” to understand. However, politics is not economics, so politicians tend to respond to people’s emotional reactions– and if economic realities stand in the way, then so much the worse for economics.

People have every right to indulge their emotions at their own expense. Unfortunately, through politics, those emotions are expressed in laws and administrative decisions by people who pay no price at all for indulging either their own emotions or the emotions of the people who vote for them.

Anyone who doesn’t like chain stores is free not to shop there. But that is wholly different from saying that they have a right to stop other people from exercising their own freedom of choice. That’s not too “complex” to understand.

~Thomas Sowell

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