Stardate 20010702.1534 (On Screen): It's a long tradition for people to use the law to discriminate against companies and products they don't like. My dad told me that when he was a kid, margarine was a new product. And it was against the law to sell margarine with yellow coloring mixed in. Margarine is naturally white, and has to be tinted to match the hue of "the high priced spread" (as they always referred to it in the TV advertising when I was a kid). So margarine was sold in double-bags, with the white material on one side and yellow coloring on the other; you'd cut the end off and squeeze them out simultaneously and mix them together. There is, of course, no reason whatever to pass such a law -- unless you're the dairy industry and have a lot of political pull. (They've been fighting a rear-guard action against margarine ever since. For most of my life it was illegal to serve margarine in a restaurant, for no obvious reason.)
When I first reached drinking age, we could get most kinds of beer in my home state of Oregon, but we couldn't get Coors. It was sold in California and in Idaho, but not in Oregon. Part of the reason why was that at that time Coors was up against a production limit and couldn't make enough. But later they increased capacity, and started selling in Washington state, though still not in Oregon. That's because it was against the law. Now it's not possible to pass a law banning a specific brand, but you might be able to find a way in which that brand differs from its rivals and ban that and that's what happened. Every other brand of beer was pasteurized, but Coors used cold-filtering, which accomplished the same purpose but which was reputed to not damage the flavor of the beer to the same extent. So Oregon had a law banning sale of unpasteurized beer. Why? It was passed at the behest of the trade unions, because Coors was the only major brewery which was not unionized. (That law has been repealed, and now Coors is sold in Oregon.)
These kinds of laws always strike me as transparently sordid, obviously passed to benefit some specific campaign contributor. Usually what happens is that someone notices and publicizes them, and then the legislature gets embarrassed and gets rid of them. It strikes me as undefendable for Germany to not permit Land's End to advertise its guarantee, which is obviously of value to German consumers. But the reason for the "fair trade" laws (which used to hold sway in the US, too, in certain product categories) was to "protect small retailers" or some such drivel. The actual effect is to annihilate any potential benefit of competition for consumers by forcing all retailers to charge the same (high) prices and offer the same (lousy) service, since there's no incentive to compete in either area. I'm glad that the German Bundestag has seen the light on this. (discuss)
