Cog wrote:Anti-gouging laws are perhaps one the worst thing ever passed into law by politicians. Causes shortages every time. The market knows what the price needs to be. Didn't prepare for an event? Sucks to be you. Go be poor somewhere else.
I'm told all the time on this very forum that the price of gasoline is too low and we should punish the consumer with high taxes on gas to reduce consumption. Well here is the chance to reduce consumption by letting the market set the price. Think Lowe's and Home Depot aren't going to increase the price of drywall and plywood shortly?
With respect, to be fair, it also depends on how the laws are managed (and they seem to vary by locality and I don't know all the details for sure).
So for example, if you have a normally volatile commodity like gasoline and you don't allow the market to function so that gas stations can make a NORMAL profit -- then you are just asking for major shortages (and all the problems those entail) after a disruption like we're having now (since prices will predictably rise after such an event).
OTOH, if 911 hits (hard for the public to intelligently plan for THAT), should rental car companies suddenly be able to charge triple or ten times the normal price for a rental car to boost the bottom line, taking advantage of that incident as an opportunity? How about where people had already reserved a car at price X? Should they be able to tell the (now stranded, as far as air travel) customer, that due to market forces they'll now have to pay ten times the price (or whatever the market will bear?)
It seems to me that there should be something in the middle for ordinary business. For example, if Home Depot incurs some extra costs due to its disaster planning which would cause fairly minor price increases in various emergency supplies -- but that lets them have LOTS of emergency supplies customers want and need, then I think that it should be fine and dandy for them to charge those minor surcharges (maybe up to 5% or 10% or something like that -- say for things like fast and unusual shipping). OTOH, they should not, IMO, be allowed to suddenly charge 400% markups for a chainsaw.
To me it's about balance. I think that's the intent of most of those laws, but I don't know how intelligently they're deployed.
I imagine we'll disagree, and that's fine. For one thing, there will be storms along the coast, and occasionally major storms. Thus, some planning is possible and in fact some planning (like flood insurance) is prudent -- but people don't want to pay the cost, even the heavily discounted cost of government provided flood insurance. And poor people lack the resources (which may be partially their own fault, but it's an issue) to do things financially that are no strain for, say, and upper middle class family. So there's that. It's a complex issue.
Given the track record of the perma-doomer blogs, I wouldn't bet a fast crash doomer's money on their predictions.