A lot of prices are decided on the basis of the need to streamline things and to avoid complications with coinage. Normal, sane people allow for this and accept it as the natural order of transacting. When was the last time you saw a price for anything other than foodstuffs, medicines or routine consumables that ended with anything other than a five, a zero or, in the case of women’s clothing, a 99? Only petty maniacs fuss and bother over a cent here and there, yet these petty maniacs are receiving encouragement from the National Euro Changeover Committee, leading to arguments and tussles in shops about one euro-cent, which is equivalent to four mils, for those who remember what mils were. Twenty-five years ago, my mother, my sisters and I used to raise our eyebrows about a local shopkeeper who must have been the last to retain pricing with two, three and five mils, and even to ask for those mils at the till. And here we are, a quarter of a century later, with shoppers encouraged to become all agitated over the euro equivalent of mere mils, and to report mils-worth of discrepancies to the euro-police.

I appreciate that the National Euro Changeover Committee is concerned with the need to fight the impression that prices will rise because of the switch to euros, but surely some sense of proportion is in order here. The Sunday Times last week carried a front-page headline: “Warnings issued over price hikes”. Gosh, I thought – this is serious business. Yet when I read through the article, all I could think was: don’t make me laugh. Six “formal warnings” have been issued by the NECC since euro-day: to two village bars for putting up the price of a glass of tea, to a pastizzi shop which rounded up the price of its pastizzi, to two GPs who set their fee for a home visit at e5 (Lm2.15) when it used to be Lm2 (e4.66), and to a car-park operating company which rounded up its prices because its machines do not accept the tiny 1c and 2c coins – a perfectly valid argument. Why should the car-park go to the expense of changing its machines, without the prospect of gaining more business if it does or losing any if it doesn’t, when it is a private business and not a State-run utility?

What we have here is a situation where the NECC has taken on the godforsaken price-control role of the Mintoffian years. I am totally against price control – not because I love to pay more and get less. On the contrary, I am quite a thrifty person who likes to pay less and get more. I am against price control because it goes against everything I believe in where the operation of business in a free market is concerned. There is one way and one way only for the consumer to deal with a situation in which he or she is asked to pay prices that might be considered too high: not to pay them, and to buy something else from somewhere else.

It’s a free country, remember? Nobody is forcing anyone to buy a pastizz from down the road at 23 cents when he can buy it from round the corner at 20 cents. The trouble is that we’re still imbued with Mintoffian thinking. I can still remember as vividly as if it were yesterday the night the police came to tell my mother to pack a bag because they were going to pick up my father and take him to the lock-up for questioning. It was long past our bedtime but the noise woke us up. The crime he had committed? The manufacturer had put up the price of one of the medicines his company imported, so he was faced with a choice between not importing it at all and leaving people without, selling it at a loss, or putting up the price by a few mils. He went for the third option – the rational one – and the police were on our doorstep after dark, like the Gestapo. It was nothing new to us kids: the Gestapo had already called once to pull the house apart in search of the highly illegal and dangerously seditious walkie-talkie somebody had reported seeing my father speak into while driving. It was the Dictaphone into which he spoke memos for his secretary. Well, you either laugh or you cry. In retrospect, you can laugh. Then, you just cried.

There’s nothing different between the thinking behind price control then and what’s happening now. The only difference is that the owner of that village bar won’t find the Gestapo on his doorstep after dark. The government said that it cannot exert price control measures because this is a free market, yet what the NECC is doing is price control by some other name. There are situations in which prices involving odd cents are impractical, and where they will have to be rounded off – up, not down, because businesses are not charities. Why shouldn’t this be allowed when you’re talking about non-essential goods? Whose business is it anyway? And I mean that literally. Ironically, it is the very things we can’t do without – water and electricity – for which prices are spiralling ever upwards.

We think there’s nothing wrong with price control. Oh, but there is. It’s very wrong. In a free country with a free market, businesses set their own prices. The controlling factor is competition. Things have never been as cheap to buy in Malta as they are now, with cut-throat competition in all sectors except the State utilities. Our homes are more comfortable and we are better-dressed and shod not just because we are earning more, but because our money goes further than it did when washing-machines cost Lm500 and average monthly earnings were Lm180.

I find it hilarious that the NECC is busying itself – not its fault, that’s true, because it has orders – with fussing about a cent here and there on a pastizz or a tazza te, when prices of household goods are falling through the floor and you can pick up a perfectly decent sofa for a couple of hundred quid – sorry, e466. Dear God, what a nation of nitpickers with tunnel vision we have turned out to be.

There’s a good reason why doctors round off their fees for house calls: they don’t carry a cash register around with them to give change. The fee for a house call was Lm2 because Lm2 is a straight note. It was Lm2 when my sons were babies 20 years ago, and if the poor sods who are dragged out to homes at all hours of the day, using their own petrol and on their own time, want to round it off to Lm2.15 to make it a straight note of e5, then for God’s sake let them. To go to and from a house call and to make the house call itself eats up a minimum of 45 minutes, which means that GPs making house calls are earning less than cleaners in private homes. The NECC insists that these GPs ask their patients for e4.66 – oh yes, I can just see that happening: “Just a minute, doctor, while I nip round to the corner shop to get some change.” This kind of stupidity is just plain exhausting. Those who are lucky enough to have a GP who makes house calls for a measly e5 should be grateful for their good fortune, instead of reporting the GP to the National Euro Changeover Committee. And for heaven’s sake, what kind of a pea-brained person reports his local hanut tat-te for putting up the price of his morning glass of tea by a couple of euro-cents?

All this kind of person needs is the encouragement of the NECC with its formal warnings about a cent on a pastizz. Read my lips and repeat after me: in a free market, businesses set their own prices. The freer the market, the lower the prices. If you think a price is too high, don’t pay it. Buy elsewhere. Sneaking to the mummy government about the naughty shop should not be an option. The naughty shop is free to lose you as a customer. It is free to ask you for as much as it likes and you are free not to pay it. Grow up, folks. It’s called the real world.

* * *

When the adults around them fail to protect them, children can end up in a horrible mess. This is what happened to a 13-year-old girl who was sentenced to seven days’ detention in Corradino Prisons after being charged in the Juvenile Court with pulling a young woman’s hair and injuring her. A child sent to prison? Yes. The law distinguishes between detention and imprisonment. You are imprisoned for crimes but detained for contraventions, and detention doesn’t go down on your police record. Yet in practical terms, the two are the same: you end up in prison, as this child did.

The prison director, Sandro Gatt, said that this girl is the youngest person ever to be held in prison in Malta, as far as he can recall, at least. I’ve no doubt that plenty of children were imprisoned here in earlier centuries, as they were elsewhere. But that’s just it, isn’t it? We are supposed to be more enlightened now, but apparently, children can still fall through the net and end up at Corradino. I knew of a 15-year-old boy who ended up there four years ago, simply because he was in trouble for stealing a handbag, his mother didn’t want him at home, and no charitable institution had room for him. They put him in prison to keep him off the streets. That’s what happens when the government relies on the charity of priests and nuns, who can barely cope, to care for homeless or unwanted children, instead of using taxes and national insurance to fund a real welfare state and to set up an organised system of caring for children whose parents are hopeless.

How does a 13-year-old girl end up in prison? You tell me, because I am at a loss to understand. I gather that the prison guards, finding themselves with a child on their hands, did their best before somebody came up with the brilliant wheeze of “consulting doctors” who had her released to Mount Carmel Hospital. This is not necessarily because she needed treatment for her mental health: 13-year-old girls who behave aggressively towards other girls, gang up on them and pull their hair are an entirely normal thing, as anyone who went to a convent school with 400 other girls will tell you (I certainly can). They don’t need mental treatment or “therapy”. They grow up and get over it, if they’re allowed to. The girl was sent to Mount Carmel Hospital not because she is mentally ill, but to serve the rest of her detention period. In other words, the mental hospital is being used as an alternative to prison, even for those who are not in need of treatment. The Young Offenders section at Corradino is full of teenage boys, and so a most unsuitable place to deposit a 13-year-old girl, while the rest of the prison is full of seasoned adult offenders, and hence, even more unsuitable.

Sending a perfectly sane child to a mental hospital to “save” her from prison is crazy reasoning, if you will excuse the connotations. A mental hospital is an even less suitable place to detain a child than a prison, and one likely to have a more deleterious effect on her. Given the hideous choice as a 13-year-old, I would have opted for a week in prison rather than a week in a mental hospital. I trust the adults involved in this ugly case were not thinking only of themselves. Detaining a child in a mental hospital does not lead to unpleasant accusations (after all, you never know, the child might really have been mentally ill, and pigs might fly), but detaining a child in prison makes us shudder.

It is matters like this that are the true indicators of how civilised a country really is.