For those of you who still think that evil corporations need to be restrained from price gouging and profiteering by government regulation, that bottle of milk in your refrigerator shows that exactly the opposite is true: government regulation enables evil corporations to price gouge and profiteer.

Last April I brought you the story of Hein Hettinga, a dairy farmer in Arizona who went up against Big Dairy, offering milk at 20 cents per gallon less than his competition, because he was exempt from the socialist milk marketing system established in the U.S. in 1937.

Big Dairy, to wit: Dean Foods and the Dairy Farmers of America, paid off some politicians, including incoming Senate majority leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and Rep. Devin Nunez (R-Calif.), to have a law passed to require Hettinga’s Sarah Farms to participate in the collectivist scheme. He now has to pay his competitors a “crippling” $400,000 a year to stay in business.

In a House floor speech, Nunez said that having Hettinga compete fairly was “not free market capitalism” and that screwing him over by forcing him into the socialist milk marketing scheme would “restore free market principles.”

And milk prices all across Arizona and California have gone back up, with the profits going to Big Dairy.

Now it seems theWashington Post has finally noticed the plight of Hettinga and others like him who just wanted to offer a product at a fair price, and like the rest of us, were screwed by socialism. ThePost fills in a little background:

For Costco shoppers, it was a good deal, according to an e-mail sent last year to Reid’s office by Joel Benoliel, Costco Wholesale Corp.’s senior vice president. The arrangement lowered the average price of milk “by 20 cents a gallon overnight and it stayed that way for three years,” Benoliel wrote in the e-mail, made available to The Washington Post. “Milk suppliers in southern California were gouging the public on price (20 cents a gallon higher than N. California) for years and were unresponsive to our call for lower prices. It was a brazen case of price gouging and profiteering by the strongest, largest market suppliers simply because they could.”

In Arizona, Hettinga was competing for retail sales against Arizona’s biggest milk company, Shamrock Foods Co. of Phoenix. He “wasn’t by any stretch a more cost-effective operator than we are. He just didn’t have the same rules apply,” said Shamrock’s general manager, Michael A. Krueger.

United Dairymen of Arizona, a cooperative that handles 85 percent of the state’s milk, complained that by keeping his milk outside the Arizona pool, Hettinga was affecting the USDA price-setting formula, lowering returns for other dairies.

In California, the Hettingas were taking on the two biggest players in the U.S. milk industry: Dean Foods Co., the largest processor of dairy products, with $10 billion in annual sales and five California plants, and Dairy Farmers of America, a co-op that controls nearly a third of the nation’s liquid milk.

In Southern California, the co-op sells to Dean Foods, which in turn sells to retailers. As Hettinga’s milk began reaching Costco stores, there was a snowball effect as other milk suppliers were forced to lower their prices, Costco’s Benoliel said. — Washington Post

So, of course, the representatives of Big Dairy complained — loudly — and started funneling millions of dollars to Congress in order to either force Hettinga into the collective, or force him out of business.

Because, of course, we can’t allow anybody to come in and offer the same product at lower prices. It might reduce big corporate profits and improve people’s standard of living. That’s why we need socialism: to keep big corporations big, and keep the little guy down.

Hettinga has filed a federal lawsuit, alleging that the so-called Milk Regulatory Equity Act of 2005 is unconstitutional.

“I still think this is a great country,” Hettinga told thePost. “In Mexico, they would have just shot me.”