You're just bitter bc the police didn't shoot a bunch of the black poors that you hate so much.

I don't understand how you can police price but not supply?

A lot of people do not understand the difference from price gouging and price increasing...

Some others have touched on this concept already itt, but none have named it:

"social capital"

Distinct from material capital, or financial capital, social capital is a currency that absolutely represents value. It is not exchanged directly as physical notes, so you may not see it if you aren't looking for it, but it is there.

Negative social capital yields a boycott, positive social capital yields a donation of something-for-nothing, which is economically inexplicable if you limit yourself to the material conceptualization of capital.

Price gouging represents negative social capital, and it is therefor economically a bad idea.

The notion that "morality" is separate from economics is flawed because that notion does not account for social capital.

Well said, very well articulated.

Yes, thank you for putting the term to the concept that many of the people ITT just don't get, bc they can't comprehend that people have feelings and behave on those feelings.

Disney* and Amazon both found out the hard way.

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

http://time.com/money/4931521/amazon...-irma-florida/

Americans are incredibly sensitive to the price of gasoline (water, not so much). If it even goes up 10 cents, people start complaining. But the dummies want to charge $100 a gallon right before a hurricane. lol


* Ironically, Disney's NORMAL prices are so high that people didn't realize they weren't increasing the prices. The only solution for them to avoid bad publicity would have been to LOWER prices during the crisis.

Excellent. So you're a free marketeer? You're making strong arguments for it. This is one of the foundation blocks of the anti-law/free market position. I think it's a weak argument but it's an argument nonetheless.
Are you really that much of a partisan nutcase you think people don't get that simple concept? I have to start taking people as they are rather than as I hope they'll be; anyone who says the SAT has no predictive value has a broken mind and that's the end of that.

People do have feelings and do behave on their feelings.

It's also well established that feelings are often times irrational and lead people to make irrational decisions, often to one's own detriment.

Constructing public or economic policy on the basis of people's feelings seems like a terrible idea though.

Do you honestly think that human nature regarding profit and self interest are actually different now than at other points in human history?

The basis of your entire viewpoint is still just your own subjective view of what constitutes right/wrong, fair/unfair,

You might as well argue that price gouging should be illegal because God says so.

Yes time changes, there are more products now than before. More goods to share. It is easier today to have enough now than in the past. You do not need to hoard or overcharge to have a good life. The problem with society is we still live in a dog eat dog mentality world. Wanting more than we actually need.
When people are in need, the first thing you should think is how can I help, not oh how can I make more money if you already have enough. You trying to tell me money made is more important than helping others if you already have excess? It's just some people do not think about others feeling.

TS, I don't think a "free market" is meaningfully possible.

Let's say I'm the best carpenter - I'm just physically and mentally suited before any training, and I kick ass all over the carpentry world.

You would say a "free market" allows me to sell my carpentry skills for whatever price I want, for whatever people can/will afford.

But that freedom is only from my perspective. From the perspective of a market participant who cannot afford to compete with other buyers, they do not have the freedom meaningfully to participate - their bids are irrelevant. From the perspective of other suppliers who can't compete with my awesomeness, they are similarly not free to charge what they want - they are bound by the ceiling I create.


Similarly so for "anarchy", there will always be a power structure in place. The question is what kind of levers will be available to control that structure and to whom those levers will be accessible.

Yeah I had trucks trapped in FL for this Hurricane by traffic/fuel concerns. I also watched Distribution Centers try to breach every contract they could to avoid receiving anything perishable that wasn't going to sell well in a Hurricane (in this case pumpkins).

My entire week last week was pretty much spent dealing with super weird market conditions and bat**** crazy situations spawned by Irma.

Nobody is arguing there shouldn't be some kind of coordinated national disaster response agency... It's the idea that you should put laws in place that force prices to stay the same that aren't ok. Remember that fear of public outcry should keep a lid on prices to some extent.. And where it doesn't the situation is probably quite desperate.

What are you offering here, a story that illustrates how people are completely irrational about supposed price gouging but it's somehow the company's fault? That'll teach Disney to provide goods and services? Do you think this advances an argument about increasing the social good in any way?

Yes, it's obvious large corporations face reputation effects that may prevent them from properly pricing goods to prevent hoarding (the same article mentions a pallet of water that was gone in forty-two seconds). But let's be clear here: they face these effects because of irrational folks like yourself and a few others in this thread. You offer no evidence that raising prices in a natural disaster actually harms consumers. It's your lack of understanding that drives your emotional reaction, which in turn harms a company's reputation, and then you hold up the reputational cost they pay as evidence that price gouging is bad. No, your lack of comprehension of basic economics is what's bad.

The reputation constraints large corporations face are sad, because they are the entities most capable of providing critical goods during a crisis. But through the magic of economics these constraints provide an opportunity for Joe Small-Time to fill the market need for products. But Joe Small-Time doesn't get the chance. Thanks to emotionally-driven laws supported by you and those like you, Joe Small-Time goes to jail.

That's how free market works yes. I'm confused why this is a problem. The reason why services cost what they cost is because of the dynamics you're describing.

I'm sorry but the vast majority of products in the world are not required to go on living. Those that are usually have a cheap version that is affordable by all. The only products where this is not true probably SHOULD be nationalized. Those are healthcare/defense/fire/naturally monopolistic big infrastructure. Every time the government leaves the enclosure of special cases that break the free market bad things happen. Literally everything outside this basic structure mutates the market in all sorts of terrible ways. The more complex it is the worse it is generally.

Exactly free market does not always work, in a disaster you think free market is the best approach? When there is not enough of a good we need to share, not whoever has the most money gets the most.

Assuming the disaster does not break the modern supply chain for longer than a week or two supply and demand should handle it fine. The trucking market just did. I was there, they moved like a bunch of bees pollinating everything nearly perfectly.

If an area is out of supply for more than a week or two the whole conversation will be moot because it's going Mad Max... But preventing that is where the government comes in for real.

demand inelasticity is a death knell for laissez-faire economics

I do believe in market economy but I also believe sharing when you have excess in a crisis.

The fish are biting today, Ma!

What does that have to do with price "gouging"?

In a disaster if the prices are too high, only the wealthy can afford the goods. Leaving the poor to suffer if they can not buy enough

The point is that they don't care about the poors. They just want to make money. Who cares who suffers as long as they get rich?

That has nothing to do with price gouging. You don't need harmful laws to force people to share. I consider helping people part of being human.

I suspect there is strong correlation between people advocating price gouging laws and those who are least charitable in their own lives.

That certainly holds for charity in general. The top 10 states in charitable giving are all red states. The bottom 10 are all blue states. https://www.philanthropy.com/article...-Divide/156175

Aaaand we're back to page 1 post 1 of this thread.

You're an academic? That is profoundly depressing.

This post is spot on. Finding the optimal amount of capitalism/socialism is a math problem with a number of knowable variables some of which we haven't discovered yet. Too much of either is very bad but the correct amount is determined by the previously mentioned variables.

The only thing I'm 100% certain of is that going all the way either way is never going to work. Yeah I know it makes our brains hurt, but this stuff is complicated and being smart means admitting when the other side is right.

Tooth needs to recognize that the free market is one economic system that is imperfect like all the others. It's a very good economic system for certain, but it does have a few blind spots that need coverage or bad things happen.

The leftists need to acknowledge the colossal waste that goes along with government spending. We're talking 25-50% of the money here. They need to acknowledge that much of this waste is of the worst sort (deadweight loss that ends in no one's pockets... the government paying people to do things that literally do not need to be done and nothing new of value will be added to the world). They need to acknowledge that 20th century need based welfare has been a huge disaster and something brand new is needed.

There's plenty more that each side is wrong about. The reality is that ideology and tribalism are terrible for everyone because they stand in the way of getting things done. Why we don't have a reality party in this country is beyond me.