Fixed

Your papers, please:

A service station that offered discounted gas to senior citizens and people supporting youth sports has been ordered by the state to raise its prices.

Center City BP owner Raj Bhandari has been offering senior citizens a 2 cent per gallon price break and discount cards that let sports boosters pay 3 cents less per gallon.

But the state Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection says those deals violate Wisconsin's Unfair Sales Act, which requires stations to sell gas for about 9.2 percent more than the wholesale price.

So much for the free market and healthy competition. I'm certain the state lawyers legislators can produce a slick, perfectly "reasonable" explanation for state-enforced price fixing -- most likely some steaming pile of donkey crap about "preventing infrastructure collapse due to cut-throat marketing," or some other half-baked rhetorical double-speak.

The fact remains, however, that the state is arbitrarily controlling the prices of a privately produced and distributed commodity. There is simply no way I'll ever be convinced that such is a good economic practice, no matter how economically integral and vital the commodity in question. No good has ever come of suppressing market competition; just ask the Soviets.