He wants to prevent Walmart from turning a $50 billion quarter into $75 billion via raising prices during a Florida hurricane.

impossible was your word not mine...

im not knocking the ability of the free market to discover prices or the benefits of that system, im saying that the argument is that anti-gouging laws are aimed at protecting consumers during specific dislocations of that pricing mechanism (i.e. if local ~monopolies are created). im also more playing devils advocate than actual advocate here, but as i said above i think "should we prefer it if it's practical" and "is it practical" are two separate questions and most of the thread is really about the former.

It is, for all practical purposes, impossible to tell when a pile becomes a heap. Therefore we shouldn't call anything a heap.

It is, for all practical purposes, impossible to figure out what the age of consent should be. Therefore we shouldn't have any restrictions on having sex with young people.

That is an interesting theory. Doesn't have any practical use during disasters.

Very unlikely?!?

Toothey's shortlist of evil scum:

The poors
The blacks
The Muslims
Anyone who needs gas and basic supplies during a natural disaster

BrianTheMick2 -
You appear to favor anti-gouging laws and rationing.

Who sets the ration? Are rations transferrable?

What happens when one person needs more than the rationed amount of gas and someone else needs less?

Do you believe that rationing will result in a better allocation of gasoline than the free market would without anti-gouging laws?

This still leaves me unable to buy gas in Austin after Harvey.

To me a solution is not very good if it doesn't do a better job of getting gas to the people who need it.

Preventing shortages also protects customers.

Discouraging people from buying gas that don't need it so there's gas left for others 'protects customers'.

Your needs seem pretty irrelevant when compared to those who were truly affected by the storm, lost everything, and are still suffering. I'm sorry you were slightly inconvenienced but why should anyone care?

You know one side is getting crushed when they're resorting to this kind of dopey dishonesty.

Taking gasoline as an example, how hard is it to understand that if you raise gasoline prices there's a price point where you'll be able to get all the gas you are willing to pay for?

What are the sides in this debate anyway? You seem to be taking a perfectly reasonable position that raising prices in response to increasing demand will result in more supply being available. The other side is that keeping prices artificially low is the moral choice to make even though it causes a shortage? No wonder you are killing it.

I'm sorry that I didn't do a good job explaining my point.

There was a shortage of gas throughout central Texas after Harvey. This was not a result of a supply shortage. It was a result of a spike in demand because people were worried about a supply shortage that didn't exist.

I think it would have been better if gas stations had raised prices high enough that they didn't run out of gas. This is the most effective way I know of to 'ration' the gas.

I think that the free market does a better job than bureaucrats of allocating resources.

Of course my individual needs are no more relevant than anyone else's -- I just mentioned it as a concrete example.

Can you give me an example of a country that allocates resources according to needs and suffering and gets reasonable results?

Venezuela?

The US federal government pours a ton of resources into dealing with crisis situations like this for better or for worse. You'd be hard pressed to find a modern country that doesn't.

It could result in people overbuilding / inflating the prices of real estate in areas that're prone to these types of disasters, but I'm guessing these costs are (or at least should be) reflected in property taxes as kind of an obligatory insurance policy.

yes, it does. those price increases also hurt other consumers, and there is a cost-benefit analysis that should be done when implementing policy. im fine with a general presumption that free market pricing is the best approach, as a default, but its not one that cant be overcome and i dont think we should be pretending that anyone has conclusively proved that there is no anti-gouging type law that would produce better results. to be clear, i also dont think anyone has proved that a certain anti-gouging policy does produce better results either. i have no idea what you think of government regulation of anti-competitive behavior/monopolies, but i dont think its controversial to say that at least some of this regulation is a net positive for society.

You make an assertion about how no one has conclusively proven the net negative effects of price gouging laws but then take anti-trust laws being a good thing as a given. Nearly all economists are against price gouging laws and a not insignificant percentage of economists would support scrapping anti-trust laws completely. For example, the former Fed Chair. https://www.wired.com/1998/06/greens...ve-monopolies/

"Bad" monopolies don't exist in a free market. They only exist when government gives a business a special privilege. Anti-trust are a negative for society. They encourage corporations to spend money begging government to not harm them.

This is not true... they don't exist in efficient markets. The assumption a free market is always efficient is flawed. Sometimes there are outside constraints like an act of god that limits transportation and therefore competition. If that's the case the market becomes inefficient and allows for detrimental things to happen to the economy.

Greenspans argument is that anti-trust laws are not making the market more efficient and are actually hindering it's efficiency since a dominance in an industry does not last in free markets so it will become efficient eventually. This is debatable and certainly right in at least some situations but saying that a market during a hurricane is efficient shows a lack of how markets function in the short term. He's obviously looking at the long term ramifications of the economy as well as he doesn't reference the larger barrier to entry industries have without anti trust laws (takes longer to reach efficiency).

If ya can't beat em, call them a racist.

Toothsayer makes these hilarious comments as if they are fact. Literally never seen homeless people hanging around church in my life. I do see them selling homeless newspapers on the corner though!

I think you'd see far more water and fuel if the free market was allowed to operate. Triple the price and it becomes very +EV to risk losing a truck and leave it parked and loaded. Or to stock up a warehouse and take the risk of looting into account. Or a million other things.

When you can't up prices, you can't price in risk, so risky situations will be undersupplied, especially in things where the profit margin is thin.

The anti-gouging guys are acting like there's no way to get water and fuel to somewhere when there's a hurricane. That's comical. The market could easily supply all wants during these periods - by stocking up before, by taking risk actions, by flying it in via helicopter after the winds abate (600 pounds of water = 150 miles of helicopter flight = `$600 operating costs = $1/pound extra - see how that works?)

What would people without clean drinking water prefer?

- $4/30 ounce water
- No clean water obtainable at any price?

The anti-gouging guys want to deprive the suffering of basic necessities. They're awful people. Racist too, given that their idiocy disproportionately affects minorities.

What kind of lives do you people live? I've seen hundreds of churches and nearly all have beggars outside them. They go from mass to mass on Sundays. Perhaps it's more a European thing?

Perhaps. Here there is a common program where on Friday or Saturday evenings drivers search the city for the homeless. They pick up those who are willing and give them a place to sleep and shower for the evening. Churches in the us are commonly strapped for cash. Building projects take lots of money and congregations are shrinking due to the fact that fewer people view going to church as a thing that must be done.

Is anyone in the US dying of thirst or starvation during any of these disasters? If so, it certainly seems like something that would make headlines everywhere and I don't recall seeing any reports of it.

It seems to me that if you can have 3 large scale disasters in short succession with millions of people displaced and nobody is dying from thirst or starvation that the problem is largely solved and you're trying to fix a problem that doesn't exist.

It takes at least a month to die of starvation, and there is always water available in these disasters - which involve intense rain and flooding. So no, few people dying of either except those already sick.

Do you think your country's response to Katrina was a good one? Do you think the people there had what they needed? Do you think the government and charities supplied their needs, let alone their wants?

How is a guy able to buy generators, drive them down and sell them for 2x normal price if people have what they need?

Being days, let alone weeks without decent food or electricity or fuel isn't fun for people. You think that's a "solved problem". And people like you are often the bureaucrats in charge. Human wants go unmet because "hey, no one is dying of thirst or starvation! And at least we thwarted those evil price gougers!"

This was exactly the mindset that kept a billion peasants poor and miserable in communist hellholes like Russia or China. "They have food, they have water, they have rudimentary shelter, what more does a true communist need?"
So if no one is dying from thirst or starvation, all is cool and there's no problem to solve? You should apply for a job at FEMA. Also, never donate to the third world. Virtually no one dies of thirst and starvation except in occasional famines, so there's no problem to solve imo.

My post specifically addressed the US policy during times of disaster so I'm not sure what any of your response has to do with that. The point of my post was that the US has developed a better system of dealing with a large scale short term crisis than any other country in the world. Decades have been spent improving the system that is currently in place.

Surely you can see the huge strides made by the US w/ regard to disaster relief between Katrina and Harvey.

Can you provide some examples of other countries with better systems in place for dealing with a disaster? Preferably countries where no price gouging laws exist and which have solved the shortages caused by disasters?

I believe it was you in another thread who was talking about how you can't just make large scale policy shifts w/o there being unforeseen consequences?

The US has a policy in place which prevents anyone from dying from lack of food or water during a disaster. If I'm understanding you correctly you'd like to do away with that policy and just allow businesses to charge whatever they want for food and water during a crisis and then sit back and see what happens?

It's not an either/or situation - one extreme or the other. Allowing free market pricing does not mean that no one will be able to afford anything.