Hurricane Harvey Is When We Need Price Gouging, Not Laws Against It

forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2017/08/27/hurricane-harvey-is-when-we-need-price-gouging-not-laws-against-it/#7563bfde7ffb

''"Price gouging by Texas merchants in the path of Hurricane Harvey has drawn the attention of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who said Saturday that his office is looking into such cases.

“We’ve already found one big retailer that was charging $42 for a case of water,” Paxton told Fox & Friends. “Another, a gas station $99 for a case of water.”

"We’ll be dealing with those people as we find them,” he said."''


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Are they stupid? This is how you radicalize people away from you. "wtf why aren't we allowed to starve you during natural disasters!"

You underestimate just how high on ideology these guys tend to be.

how does Holla Forums refute this

Here's a screencap of the full thing. I couldn't archive it because Forbes has some weird welcome popup that fucks it up.
The guy who wrote it is a "Senior Fellow of the Adam Smith Institute" and a UKIP supporter.

ow the edge

Supply naturally increases to meet demand regardless of price. Price gouging is just a temporary way to needlessly increase the profits of the companies in Texas at the expense of people who just got hit by a fucking hurricane.

Because making the poor (who are most affected by natural disaster" empty their bank accounts for basic necessities is fucking abominable. it reads more like a treatise on why using le free market to attend to disasters is a fucking terrible idea that only the worst of sociopaths would support.

And he has the gall to lecture other people on "Econ 101"?

Regardless of what one thinks about the UK leaving the EU, pretty much every economist was unanimous in their judgment that Brexit, in the form advocated by the UKIP movement, was an economically disastrous proposition.

Forbes has a bunch of weird shit on its website.

Because "Supply and Demand balancing out" for necessities doesn't mean everyone gets them. It means only people who can afford/shell out in desperation manage to secure them. Rationing by price isn't even a good idea, those who can afford the goods will hoard them when they could be rationed out while people wait for aid. We can't exactly rely on people in a disaster zone to be charitable/reasonable enough to share. As for the idea that "they're willing to pay so it's okay", apparently it's fine to force someone to become an indentured servant for life if you're the only person with some life saving medicine, after all, they willingly made the exchange right?

The cases the article mentions aren't of people bringing in new supplies, but rather people who held onto the supplies that were already in the disaster area.

I've seen other articles justifying price gouging or, at best, arguing the issue would correct itself.

Fuck this country tbh

Because if you just have a coordinated effort to meet people's needs then you will eventually be able to meet them, but in the meantime rationed water will be administered to the people who need it and not to whoever can most afford it. It also helps combat hoarding, since it's entirely possible that gougers will artificially limit supplies to drive up the price.

Amazingly this is one of the very rare occasions when the capitalist media is (accidentally) half right.
Read Koffski.

Price gouging isn't going to get relief supplies there any faster.

don't worry guyz the free market always provides

amen

Literally who. Seriously I can't even find him on google.

Who is Koffski?

And people wonder why people started looting during Katrina. Lmao.

I would steal if I was in their situation as well. Fuck that bullshit. Over 20 dollars for water? These motherfuckers need to be hung.

That's just the normal price for a 24 pack of water. :^)

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Freedom ain't free

Nothing, free market right? What if the poor just steal what they need? What's that? That's illegal? So is price gouging.
What's the the police will kill them? There's more proles with guns than bourgeois with pigs.
I thought killing was okay, oh… only when it comes to protecting your property.

How could communism solve there being more demand than supply in the case of a disaster?
Give everything to the dear leader and everybody else just dies?

papa Wolff refutes this in this econominute
youtu.be/ZtZNw360x6c

Rationing

This guy is fucking retarded.
He claims to be an economist but I took economics 101 and have a little business experience and can tell you he doesn't know shit about how the free market works.

You find a niche and you exploit it until it's no longer profitable; that's like business 101.
You go there while water is $40 and undercut the competition and people buy from you.
They then undercut you and people buy from them.
You undercut them and people buy from you.
Every time you undercut the competition you're still making buko bux, just not peak profits.
Eventually the price returns to normal or to a point where it's not profitable to go lower and equilibrium is achieved.

Let me reiterate; this guy is a fucking moron.

Since when is Juche communism?

Disaster relief and rationing. The sane way.

And if there's not enough to sustain the entire population without some dying?
What then?
Who gets to live and who gets to die?

B A S I C E C O N O M I C S

You know Professor Wolff became a marxian economist AFTER already having a Masters in economics.

Well obviously the people with the most money are more gooder, so more people die instead under capitalism.

He must have cheated on his exams
Is that even possible?
Sounds like a fraud

You didn't answer the question.
Who is chosen to die?

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Also appeal to authority fallacy.
His argument is illogical and unsupported, mine was clearly outlined and logical

You are the one advocating for tyranny of capital, so everyone who can't afford $100 for some water bottles should die. Under a fair system it would go to those most in need, children, sick, elderly etc. and then distributed as evenly as possible to the rest.

I know this as someone with experience in business.
People with a nose for business cream themselves when they find an inefficiency like that.
They live to serve that market and make tons of profit.
He's living in la la land

So you're saying that the lives of children, sick, and elderly, are worth more than people who can actually work and fix the mess that is the disaster?
Wow, no wonder communism always fucks up.
When the first famine comes they let the productive people die so the useless people can live.
Then nobody is left to unfuck everything and they starve too!

He's also going against the scientific consensus in economics.
He's like a climate change denier of economics

So price gouging is good because what exactly?

Those are people who are not chosen to live but those who are at most risk to die.

Yeah, who needs to actually study economics and it's social impacts when you can have muh intuition as a small business entrepreneur meme? Thank you for doing all you can to rip people off, blessed job creator.

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You either think economics is a legitimate field of study and consensus matters, or you think it's pseudoscience and his qualifications mean nothing except that he's exceptionally well qualified at fortune telling.
Pick your poison

It's not good or bad.
It's just something that seems outrageous to idiots, but is in fact a natural part of the market recovering

The only way to pay for freedom is sweat and blood.
The slavers won't just going to release you for paying him a hundered.

How about "economics is a soft science, being mostly sociological" meaning that it's incredibly difficult for there to be a "scientific consensus" because soft science doesn't work that way.

A lot of bourgeois economics isn't "scientific" in any sense, it's presented as unquestionable dogma and critiques of any kind aren't even taught. Listen to Wolff talking about his experience in school.

youtu.be/3wkO3qsZY_U

There would be no water to photograph if the price was lower


Who wonders that? Of course there's going to be looting in New Orleans. There's looting even with no hurricane.

If there is water to take pictures of then that means there is someone who needs water but cant have it.

They don't need a hurricane to run out of food and water, that's just Wednesday

There weren't any famines in communist nations after the Great Leap Forward, and it should be noted that there were famines in capitalist nations occurring in the same time period. In fact, "breadlines" were a thing in the American Great Depression, not in any Marxist-Leninist country (in fact, the Soviets kind of overproduced bread)

Except this is a disaster, you idiot, and necessities are in short supply.

Could some people undercut you in price? Sure. Except that, first, people are desperate and in danger and don't have the time or resources to "shop around" and even if they were, resources at reasonable prices will be quickly bought out, forcing many to have to go to the gougers, in many ways the people "undercutting" price are idiots for missing out on a profit opportunity and, second, people don't always behave the way bourgeois economists say they ought to. These people are perfectly aware that they're able to get away with this gouging because this is a disaster and people are desperate and supplies are low, they're not going to let go of a wonderful profit opportunity because some vague law of the market says they ought to because maybe these stranded and desperate people might shop around.

Am I the only Houstonfag on Holla Forums?

He does also have a PhD in Economics as well tho. But don't worry you definitely know more than him with your babby tier economics education.

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I don't know, how do you refute a fantasy scenario based on wishful thinking?

Don't you know? All the world's problems would be solved if "the weak" weren't keeping "the strong" from doing it somehow

t. Ayn Rand

I want to put my hands around this cunt's neck and squeeze until I see the lifeforce leave his eyes.
Jesus Christ and God Almighty, what a pile of refuse of a human being.