Groceries were always the best illustration of the merits of free markets. How ridiculous it would be if we decided collectively - by annual ballot, say, or by entrusting the decision to some Whitehall bureaucrat - which fruits and vegetables the shops should stock and in what quantities. A system whereby competing retailers offer individual consumers a daily choice is obviously better. Yet we are close to driving the free market out of the grocery sector...

For example, as the all-party parliamentary group for small shops pointed out in a report last year (High Street Britain: 2015), retail is usually a good sector in which to start up your own business because the entry barriers are very low. Many budding entrepreneurs have used retail as a stepping stone to other sectors. An important form of self-help and enterprise is therefore disappearing. So is a source of innovation. Supermarkets now sell some organic food but I doubt they would have done so without the example of independent retailers.

Most notoriously, the supermarkets screw their suppliers. We sometimes forget that choice matters (or ought to matter) as much to us when we are selling as when we are buying. In the US, wrote Barry Lynn of the New America Foundation in Harper's Magazine last year, Wal-Mart doesn't just dictate price to its suppliers. It also dictates how they package their products, how they transport them and gather and process information about them. At a snap of a supermarket's fingers, a farmer may have to switch from one variety of cabbage to another. And where a supermarket has local dominance, anyone with retail skills to sell has to accept its wages and working conditions or do without a job...

For the complete article, please visit the New Statesman website.

To read Barry Lynn's article in Harper's, please click here.