Again, just laughably stupid semantic attempts. Do go on.

It's not about this,

It's about this,



The people on your side are not saying the rich people need it the most, they're saying that the rich people sometimes benefiting an inordinate amount, because the system is not going to be perfect, is a necessary evil they're willing to accept.

I don't see why you can't walk it back. I already walked backed a point that pvn addressed with regards to NYC. I was like Seinfeld at the end of the dermatologist episdoe, "ohhh, skin cancer!"

Wat? Did that sentence even make sense to you?

Yes. Your trolling is just sad at this point. Strawman all you want to try to pigeonhole me into an argument you disagree with, it's not going to work.

Who is pretending that?

Me.... if you cut off half of a sentence in my post, misconstrue that and scream real loud.

Ikes I assume youre taking the next 3.5 hours off this argument?

why?

Umm the tOSU game?

sooooo?

As the number 1 tOSUfan id assume you want to give it your undivided attention.

yeah.... that was a punishment for losing a ff league. I went to Michigan.

Hahaha you can at least root for the B1G teams. Im happy that with Harbough we'll have an actual rivalry again and a better conference.

You're treating this as some kind of universal principle, but people are pointing out that in certain circumstances when certain assumptions are true/not true, the free market simple doesn't reach the conclusion you want it to, and it's rational that people prefer other methods. It's not simply a matter #feelings for the poor.

I like 5ive's posts itt and hope he sticks around.

You haven't really shown any of that. This is a prime example of economic nihilism, where people point out that the real world is slightly more complicated than a barebones econ 101 model, therefore they can believe whatever nonsense they like.

I'm happy to grant that willingness to pay is not a perfect proxy for utility. Therefore, I will concede that it is theoretically possible that you could increase some unmeasurable aggregate utility number by siphoning gas from some people's cars to other people's. But you don't have an army of minions bearing magical utility scanners, flexible plastic tubes, and jerry cans. What you have are lines.

You are apparently claiming that a mixture of willingness to wait in line plus random luck is a better proxy than willingness to pay for utility. But there are a lot of reasons to believe that's not true. But there are a lot of reasons to believe that's complete false. For example, people whose jobs are still on during whatever disaster caused the supply disruption (emergency responders, maybe construction dudes trying to fix things, truck drivers trying to bring in emergency supplies, regular dudes working checkout at the grocery store) will be highly unwilling to spend hours in a gas line, but they presumably have high utility for gas. Random luck is obviously a terrible proxy for utility. Moreover, since the waiting-in-line + luck price is flat for any quantity of gasoline purchased, everyone who gets to the front of the line will fill up their tank (or buy as much gas as they are allowed to), rather than just buying as much as they need for the next couple days, even if the last couple of gallons have very low utility. And of course, everyone's time spent waiting in line for gas is a pure waste of utility.

On the other hand, willingness to pay is actually a decent proxy. Sure, some rich people might cruise around when they don't truly need to because they can afford to. But even the poorest person can probably scrape together $15 for the gas they need to make it to work. So it's quite reasonable to believe that everyone who has a serious "need" for gas will get it. And of course, high prices incentivize supply in a way that long lines do not.

A final point is that you should be much more concerned about the distributional effects of free-floating gasoline prices during normal times. A disaster is a once-in-a-decade experience that might cost a poor person $20 or 30 miles of driving. Allowing gasoline prices to go up to $4 or $5 on a sustained basis is a disaster for poor people, and if we throw away the econ 101 assumption that prices are a reasonable way to ration scarce goods, who knows what sort of utility losses might be going on. And since there's no disaster on, we have plenty of time for our wise and benevolent leaders to establish the ideal rationing and price control system to more justly allocate our scarce gasoline. Right?

Also, the notion that "poor" people can afford to buy basically as much gas as they need at the "real" price (~$3-4) and suddenly can't afford to buy any at all when it goes to $8 or $10 for some finite period of time is absolutely ridiculous on its face.

I'm not sure what you're talking about. It's not a matter of the the world being slightly complex so the whole model is thrown out, it's a matter of reporters and apparently some posters taking a Micro 101 class, thinking the market clearing equals problem solved, and the cajole others for being irrational (#feeling) when they correctly intuit that the underlying unequal distribution causes problems for simplistic solutions. This isn't, of course, licence to throw out the market system entirely and move to a command economy. I even said myself that the reducing inequality would be the best way to make it more efficient.

I have no idea I haven't been talking about gas or lines so I can't really comment.

not so fast, I might post something disagreeable any second now

i'll admit I think I'm hopelessly addicted to this forum now though

Basically all of the arguments for "price gouging" are feeling based. "I don't like paying more for gas" is kind of an understandable notion but the grownups should be able to recognize the underlying economics of what's happening and deal with it. "Why should the gas station owner profit off of this disaster!?" is a childish envy-based reaction. The idea that "the rich" are gonna just come out and buy all the 5x normal priced flashlights when they don't even need one seems pretty silly too.

You should have been here back in the day when this forum wasn't terrible.

Great post, and the last paragraph brings up a point that isn't discussed enough. There are so many areas in which the potential for "poor people can't afford things" are worse than in a natural disaster (but are widely accepted) that it really calls into question anyone who champions anti-gouging laws based on its supposed impact on the poor.

I do wonder how the anti-gougers would have reacted in a hypothetical world where say, milk was distributed free to everyone, before a free market was announced. I'm pretty sure we'd be hearing horror stories about how the rich would buy up all the milk and the economic models which showed it to be "more efficient" were failing to comprehend the dire distributional problems.

You can't accuse somebody of being simplistic and believing in nonsense when your practical example is almost completely vague and arbitrary. I mean, of course everybody gets the gas they need in that scenario, you invented it.

Apologies if this post seemed overshort and dismissive. I WAS ignoring the parts not bolded, but not because I was poo-pooing it; instead because it's theoretically solid. It's the practical application being addressed.

If Louis C. K. can chide people for thinking they deserve something 5 minutes after finding out it exists, it seems perfectly valid to question to what extent someone deserves "excess" profits for something they never planned on and just lucked out in being a part of. In either case, if you believe the person deserves the profits or not, both are "feelings" based arguments. Property rights are social conventions after all, not immutable laws of the universe.