Preachers threaten eternal damnation.

The Southern Poverty Law Center, Planned Parenthood, the Sierra Club, the NAACP, and the ACLU and all sorts of wack job liberal organizations are considered charities.


Churches should count. I am an atheist, but a typical church helps people struggling every day either with food and money. Churches do a lot more than Media Matters, which is another "charitable" organization. It is always funny to me how much people go out of their way to ridicule religious people and try to point out their hypocrisy. The reality is people who are religious are happier, live longer, more honest and less criminal, and are more giving in both time and money.

I am not a religious person but I see the churches in my area do a lot for the needy, elderly, and they sure as hell do more good for the country the ACLU who tries to destroy the USA at every turn.

but joel olsteen has a big house so all religious related charitable giving shouldn't count

Nice try at a strawman. That probably worked real well for you in... grade school.

I'm not the one trying to provide stats to show how generous red states are. If you want to make the comparisons, then do it fairly. If you want to define charity as including tithes, then show where the money is actually going (i.e. what percentage is going to help people in need). To be fair to both sides, do the same for ACLU and all the others.

I would argue that none of the money ACLU or PETA spends goes to help people in need. You might differ. Makes it a problem to have a comparison, doesn't it.

There's a reason beggars hang around churches and not academic events or champagne socialists.

I always get a kick of people hanging around churches, especially able bodied young men who could easily find employment.

2 Thessalonians 3:10

He who does not work, neither shall he eat


most churches are so soft these days, often to the detriment of the people they're trying to help

I am not religious either, but most Christian churches have things called "small group" that literally open up their homes to anyone to meet and congregate. it's a Bible study, but it always ends up with people talking about their lives, which is emotionally healthy for any human being. Plus, it's under the umbrella of "Jesus", so it doesn't resort to petty gossip and sh*t talk, like you'd find with snobby people who love to preach socialism, yet don't ever want to talk to anyone unless they are someone higher than them so they can get something out of it.

Tell me any other group of people kind enough to socialize with strangers from all walks of life. Are the people in the group perfect? F*ck no, but atleast their trying to be kind and giving people a chance.

Churches do a lot of good. I do not discount that. I'm only pointing out that the comparison is not fair given that much of the money being tithed is not going to those beggars or anyone else who needs help. The main point is that attacking blue states for not giving as much as red states is ridiculous unless fair comparisons are made.

Btw, i'm sure you're right that there are beggars outside of churches, but i cannot think of a single time in my life that i've seen that. What i do see, every single day, are beggars at all four of the major intersections at our university. But clearly, they are stupid because academics, according to you, are selfish pricks who never help anyone.

I can think of a lot of groups like that. Deadheads, musicians in general, cool people in general. It's great that there are cool Christians, just like it's great that there are cool Muslims, etc.

People in favor of anti-gouging laws:

Can you please explain to me how the rationing works? Who decides which people get how much gas/water/etc.?

Stalin decides and then executes anyone who questions it.

Cite?

an argument is: anti-gouging laws are really about protecting consumer surplus in environments where we would not expect market pricing mechanisms to adjust effectively and the consumers are particularly disadvantaged. note that anti-gouging does not mean that suppliers cannot raise prices at all, and that stores commonly have x per customer policies (as noted elsewhere in the thread) which make hoarding much more difficult.

lets say:
-cases of water normally are sold for $10
-then there is a hurricane and consumer demand becomes very inelastic and willingness to pay is now $100/case
-marginal cost of bringing a case to market (including required return) is now $20/case

is there a good reason to allow cases to be sold for more than $50? if the market perfectly and instantly adjusted to these conditions, cases would not be sold for $50 anyways. but if there were places/instances where additional supply was delayed/constrained, they might be, even though suppliers were amply incentivized to bring more cases to market. if you think that reputational concerns set a de facto price cap, then there isnt really a harm in having this law anyways (and it discourages less foresightful/kind market participants).

obviously where to set the cap is very hard to say and may even vary by situation, which doesn't lend itself to easily being made into law. one approach is to prohibit "unconscionable" price increases (an article posted somewhere in this thread cited new york as a state that takes this approach), and punt on setting a numerical cap. this obviously has the downsides of being fairly vague and not giving market participants much clarity on what is allowed. that being said, "should we prefer the policy if we could make it into law?" and "can we make it into law?" are two different questions.

the short answer to your question, though, is that "the market" still decides.

From their main rag.

http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/...charities.html

You clearly haven't been to a major city (or Vegas) recently. Or a church.

How's about those of us who are arguing itt about whether the godly and the heathens actually do something nice for those in need instead of comparing notes on who is more horrible about not contributing?

Pot meet kettle

Welcome to BFI




Much of the misunderstanding in this thread seems centered around different definitions, or lack of understanding, of what price gouging is.


Is a guy who buys generators in the midwest and drives them to a natural disaster to sell them at a 2x markup price gouging? No. He's an entrepreneur. He has overhead and deserves to be compensated for his time, risk, investment, short term increased cost of doing business, and foresight. Charging 2x for his generators is reasonable and not price gouging.

Is a store in Florida that marks the price of it's existing inventory up by 10x, because people desperately need it due to an unavoidable natural disaster, price gouging? Abso****inglutely.

Commodity prices fluctuate constantly due to supply and demand. Should they be allowed to fluctuate before and after a natural disaster based on supply, demand, and cost? Absolutely.

Prices shouldn't be allowed to increase during a crisis based solely on demand. Examples of people being outraged over price gouging all have to do with stores marking existing inventory up by outrageous prices based solely on the quantity available on hand.

Very few people get outraged over the rising price of commodities when the cost of supplying those commodities goes up. Everyone gets outraged over being ****ed in the ass in their time of need though.

You implied you would provide a working definition of price gouging but you didn't. You just provided two anecdotal examples, one of which you say is completely reasonable and not at all price gouging, but you fail to note that the government calls this price gouging, which is what we're debating here. The other example is a scenario you clearly made up to make a point but which is not something we've heard any reports of. So you support repealing the current price gouging laws, but you are in favor of prohibiting pricing that didn't happen and is extremely unlikely to happen.

If it was legal to raise prices 10x, no store would actually be able to make that much margin for any conceivable length of time. Other businesses and entrepreneurs would quickly push to supply the goods to make substantial profits, which would drive down margins. If somehow stores were selling generators for 10x, you'd have a thousand guys with U-Hauls all driving down to Florida and quickly driving the price down to 2x. The preparation would even start well ahead of time. In the absence of a price cap, opportunistic suppliers would begin preparing their supply lines as soon as news of an impending storm arrived. Rather than flee in the event of a disaster, suppliers would flood the region with goods. The higher the potential margins, the more likely this is to happen which limits these very margins.

On the demand side, savvy forward-looking customers would make purchases well in advance because they'd be incentivized to save money and not pay 2-3x during a hurricane, which would decrease demand during the hurricane. With prices being higher than normal very few would buy more than they needed, which would dramatically decrease demand everywhere.

With these effects on supply and demand from proper price discovery, prices would end up higher on average than a pre-hurricane equilibrium, but more like 1.5-2x rather than 10x, and there would be better allocation of resources--more people getting the minimum they need and far less hoarding.

All?
http://www.foxnews.com/travel/2017/0...nd-drinks.html

People were outraged Disney was charging regular and even discounted prices. Lots of people who don't understand business or economics are outraged all the time.

Is "****ed in the ass" the thread's new working definition of price gouging? It doesn't seem very technical.

Do you even read the news? There are plenty of examples of merchants marking up their existing inventory by large margins before and after every single disaster.

Those exorbitant price increases have nothing to do with any increase in cogs or increasing supply. They have everything to do with merchants who want to make a quick buck off of other's suffering.

As you've pointed out, for all practical purposes it is impossible to figure out what the 'cap' should be.

The best system we know about for finding prices is the free market system. Yes, it has problems, but there isn't much sense in advocating for laws that are very unlikely to do any better.

We had a brief gas shortage in Austin after Harvey because everyone decided to freak out and buy up all of the gas.

I sure wish the gas stations had increased their prices so I could have bought some!

de captain: What is your proposed solution?

There is no solution obviously.

What seems reasonable to me, though impossible to implement, is allowing merchants to increase prices based on cogs to maintain their profit margins (compensated for additional risk). Don't allow merchants to increase their profit margin by 5 or 10x to make a windfall off of a crisis.

For example Walmart knows down to the penny what their cogs is, along w/ expected losses due to returns and other increased costs during a crisis such as overtime, short notice trucking, etc.. Allow them to increase the price to compensate for those losses, but you don't allow them to increase their profit margin.

If a company has a 10% profit margin they should be allowed to maintain a 10% profit margin by raising prices as necessary. They shouldn't be allowed to suddenly have a 1000% profit margin. A company that has a 10% profit margin should be happy to increase revenue substantially while retaining a 10% profit margin.

If you ask the ceo of Walmart if he'd like to increase their revenue from 50 billion this quarter to 75 billion this quarter while retaining their current net profit percentage the answer should be "yes, of course". It shouldn't be "Well there is a crisis this quarter and people are suffering so we should be able to increase our revenue and increase ours profit margin by increasing the prices of goods already on the shelves so we can have a 70% profit margin this quarter!"

These people are the scum - the general public. The demand side. They put the price of gas up to a $1 billion/gallon and people like Black Peter want to let them. Yet if the shopkeepers put it up to $6/gallon,, they are evil scum and must be controlled with laws.

It's harmful busybody moralizing, that ultimately ends up hurting people.

this doesn't seem to address the issue. if retail prices need to rise to maintain a certain profit margin, it's because a supplier (or suppliers) further up the chain has increased prices in response to the disaster. or are you only interested in stopping price gouging at the retail level?