BrianGarst.com

When government’s try to control markets, people don’t sit idly by and listen to the dictates of bureaucrats telling them what they can buy, and for how much. Government meddling is countered by black markets, where people go to get what they want at closer to market prices. Europe is learning this the hard way as they struggle to control the supply of cigarettes:

Waves of smuggled Russian cigarettes flood Europe

Kaliningrad, with its frontier atmosphere, is a dangerous place to ask questions about smuggling. But this isolated Russian enclave on the Baltic is now alleged to be the home of a novel phenomenon which is alarming western authorities.

Russia is accused of allowing Britain and Europe to be flooded with a wave of cut-price smuggled cigarettes. The most recent UK seizure was this month, at Coventry.

Why is Russia being “accused” of anything? What horrible crime have they committed?  What it should say: Russia is being credited at delivering a desired good to Britain and Europe at a cheap price.  Suddenly that doesn’t sound so nefarious, does it?

So why is it so horrible that Europeans are able to spend less money on cigarettes?

Austin Rowan, who heads the unit, said: “The smuggling of Jin Ling has become a huge problem in the EU, causing substantial losses to both national and EU budgets.”

Like mobsters threatened by the prospect of customers using businesses not under their “protection,” European governments are prepared to bully free people into buying products at inflated prices in order to suck in as much money as possible.  Silly journalists then talk about how “legitimate prices” are being undercut:

Video evidence about what is going on in Kaliningrad has been obtained by the Washington-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, a non-profit group which includes East European reporters.

They went in to the factory under cover, posing as would-be Romanian buyers. A container-load of Jin Ling, which are never officially marketed in Europe, was offered for less than £60,000.

It would be worth at least £1.5m in the UK, if smuggled packs of cigarettes were sold at half the legitimate price in Britain.

The only thing that makes a price legitimate is the willingness of a buyer and a seller to get together at a particular price.  What’s illegitimate here is not the trading of cigarettes at low prices, but rather the claims that government has authority to insist on higher prices in the first place.