Re: 鈥淥il firms get supply help, but not farmers,鈥� comment, Dec. 27.
Dairy farmers such as Jan Slomp talk as though sa国际传媒 allows slavery, in claiming that a small reduction in government blockage of customers 鈥渄eprives鈥� dairy farmers of something.
To be deprived of business by competition would mean that he owns customers.
The reality is that dairy farmers have been coercing consumers for many decades, by co-opting the force of the collective government.
Slomp and others live in a country that allows private farms and freedom of choice, unlike North Korea and many tinpot dictatorships around the world. Surely Stomp鈥檚 ancestors in the Netherlands taught him about the horrors of National Socialist Germany, where the collective controlled producers and consumers.
Yet he works against the freedom he enjoys here.
Stomp also errs in using Alberta鈥檚 oil-supply reduction as justification for his coercion. Two wrongs do not make a right. And he errs in using U.S. government programs in the 1930s as justification 鈥� those prolonged the Depression, as economist Richard Stanford and others have explained.
Keith Sketchley
Saanich
