Monday, July 23, 2007

Flooding, Adam Smith and the EU

at 7/23/2007 11:26:00 am

Well I am back and apparently where I have had heatwave and sun the Northern part of Europe has been quite wet. OK, quite is an understatement, floods galore I see. I also notice though that the building work is continuing on the flood plains of the Thames Gateway.

Whilst I'm on the subject of the weather though, I witnesses the most remarkable and brilliant display of supply and demand in practice whilst abroad. Imagine if you will, you run a shop on a tourist island that gets average temperatures of 35 and up during the summer.

What is the one product that you're going to be guaranteed to be able sell? Yep. sun tan lotion. And what is the one product that you know that you can crazily mark-up with your fellow businessmen because you know they all the pale skinned Brits have to buy it? Yep, same thing again.

Price for a small bottle of sun lotion, say SPF 15? A tenner or thereabouts. It gets more expensive the higher the SPF protection. Of course I moaned, but I also shrugged and said "well I'd do it if it was my shop".

Oh yes, another quick observation, why is it, in other EU countries they just ignore all the EU rules we slavishly follow and no one seems to care? Honestly, seat belts? Who wears those? Crash helmet? What's that then?

Seriously, one day we'll learn that the way to make the EU "work" is to just ignore everything we don't like just like all the others do. I swear that is the only reason we have so many issues, and our anal attitude toward following rules. OK, normal politics back soon.


 

7 comments:

Ed said...
23 Jul 2007 12:59:00  

I would rather it was the other way around though - sensible laws that are sensible to follow instead of this mass of legislation and intrusion into every area of our life but which is safely ignored because of its ass like nature.

Because at some point people will stop remembering which laws to obey and which to ignore and the house house will fall in.

Chris Paul said...
23 Jul 2007 13:05:00  

But seat belts and crash helmets are good things.

They generally reduce harm to self. They reduce burden of self crashing on other selfs. They are unselfish rules to abide by. Aren't they?

Has the sun got to your noddle mate? Was the price of protection too great under classical S&D?

dizzy said...
23 Jul 2007 13:14:00  

As usual Chris you completely failed to understand the point and instead went on on some wild extrapolated misrepresentation of what I said. I was not saying seat belts or crash helmets were bad or good.

I was simply making a general point about how in other parts of the EU no one follows half the rules we seem to and no one enforces them either. Our smokefree stuff for example will never happen in somewhere like Greece. They'd just shrug and all carry on smoking.

JuliaM said...
23 Jul 2007 15:45:00  

"But seat belts and crash helmets are good things."

Transplant teams don't think so. They've rather reduced the supply of organs.....

kinglear said...
23 Jul 2007 16:51:00  

I was once shown round an exceptionally large Italian processing plant for grapes and wine, which had been told by Brussels to reduce their production by 30% ( wine lake don't you know).
So I asked them how they were coping with the reduction in volumes.
" No e problemo - we cheat"

Anonymous said...
23 Jul 2007 16:59:00  

So, all over tan or do you still have white bits ?

dizzy said...
23 Jul 2007 17:00:00  

I don;t tan. I just go red then peel.

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