Yesterday some dude posted a video to shame apparently Indian gas station owners charging $10 a gallon around the Hurricane Helene disaster area. The lolberts answered with rebuttals that free market pricing is the best rationing mechanism in a time of scarcity.
People are saying that the gas station could ration gallons per customer and keep the same price, and the lolberts are saying this is communist price control.
I'm not really sure how much merit is held by either position since I've never really thought about this with respect to a disaster area. Clearly the 1973 price controls were a bad idea, but this is a debate over what a private business owner should do after a hurricane. My gut feeling is that gas should be rationed by customer, not by pricing. But maybe the gas station is passing along supply chain pricing to a certain extent?
edit: Texas punished gas price gouging in 2019 after Hurricane Harvey.
That "lolbert" didn't respond the way he did because he actually believes in free market principles. He's just a snarky leftist who was trying to own the chuds. All of his posts are shilling for Kamala and immigrants.
It's going to run out anyway if you keep the price, preventing those stations from bidding for more up the supply chain, naturally further limiting supplies by stopping the pricing signal in its tracks.
Sowell's Basic Economics talks about this phenomenon. "Profit is the price paid for efficiency."
What does Sowell say about people existing in a breakdown of law and order deciding it's "cheaper" to kill the gas station owner and take the gas instead of paying his asking price? Surely that newfound substitution effect must have some impact on prices.
Hurricane Harvey has shown niggers don't need a reason to kill and steal. Volunteer rescue boats were being hijacked and mugged despite no price being charged, which the local cops didn't help by confiscating guns from law-abiding citizens.
Oh, and they bitched about wypipo not rescuing them after stealing their boats, because of course.
Where'd you see this boat story? I did some looking and couldn't find it.
I don't expect the media to make their pets look bad, but this is the closest story I can find.
Kind of a far cry from your comment. You have one instance of people trying to get into an empty, inoperable boat (as the drivers were in a truck taking shelter), not hijacked.
Where is this part?
You need proof of niggers behaving like niggers?
I need proof of someone making a specific claim, yeah.
Then gas price rises off the chart, because no more is being extracted and produced. If it's only localized breakdown, then wider society should seek feasible punishment or ostracize. Many societal evils stem from deciding homeless, disabled, etc have a positive right to live. Rational people are more incentivized to protect or avenge the shopkeeper if they fear utter isolation of their community from prodctive society.
It's already not getting there. If you want to argue that the only thing preventing gas tankers from being helicoptered in is the existence of "price gouging" laws then feel free to make that argument.
What if they don't fear "utter isolation of their community"? Laws against "price gouging" in times of natural disaster are reasonably popular, which is why they also exist in Red states. What then incentivizes the "rational people" to protect or avenge the shopkeeper? It's doubtful he possesses some particular skill in obtaining gasoline that others lack.
The arguments against many forms of democracy apply when populism devolves to tyrannical mob rule. If it's a bunch of people being NPCs who vote emotionally or tribalistically when their state ballot comes in, all sorts of nasty unintended consequences result from feel good laws. If it's local government, at least some negotiation is going on, and the voting party will revoke such superstitious law if and when resource providers choose more profitable communities, or neighbors leave when they can't access said resource.
My prior argument takes for granted that a functional, somewhat decentralized society will have contracts in place or otherwise be indoctrinated with the importance of vigilantly upholding property rights (within reason, we're talking a person owning a single gas station, not an entire city) and freedom of association. That takes precedence over the regular person's proclivity to economic and sociological illiteracy. The rational person realizes that 5 of them need to stick their necks out to dissuade the mob of 50 idiots, that didnt ration or negogiate in advance, from repercussions if they go ahead with pitchforks. If there are no repercussions, then that means the cyclical theory of civilizational collapse is gradually underway.
That's a very small part of it. If anything immigration is a far bigger issue
A lot of that nonsense falls under positive rights and the personality types that uphold non-consensual burdens. Negative rights means that charity can take care of many homeless, or that legal immigration is predicated on if individuals are a net gain to the general welfare of existing citizens.
If you were to become homeless and/or disabled this week, would you still claim a "positive right to live"?
Positive right means compelling others, under threat of prison, to provide to the unfortunate, while putting a halo on his own head for voting "compassionately". I would take services offered by government or charity, but never campaign or vote for said government services.
This is correct when there is a competitive marketplace, but immediately after a natural disaster there is no economy.
As a customer, in many cases you can't even get to another gas station because the roads are blocked or you may have two choices instead of 100. As a station owner it's not about bidding for supply chain, it's whether the truck can get to you. Charging $50 a gallon will result in 'efficiency' of flying in gasoline to power a mansion's 10 gallon an hour generator, but not the efficiency of restoring order as quickly as possible.
Market efficiency takes time to achieve. It derives from things like word of mouth, you complain about grocery costs and your friend says hey that supermarket twice as far from you is cheaper, you start going there and eventually your local one lowers prices or goes out of business.
Finding an efficient market takes longer after a natural disaster and so wastes more than just fixing the infrastructure.
Anyone who can afford a mansion near the coast would've fucked off to their second home before the hurricane makes landfall.
Or they'd stay and turn on all the lights to lord over the peasants.
It's called hyperbole. These days they're going to have solar and a dozen powerwalls, subsidized by your tax money.
Hyperbole is what women use to "prove" a point. At least make your fanciful fiction make sense.
Fun fact, they'll get government disaster relief money just like regular people that have a single home. And they'll get more of it due to the value of their house.
It's hard to say. It is true that price gouging will, to an extent, be a form of rationing. You'll be more likely to buy only what you need and not as much as you're able. Logically, this makes sense. Further, if you sold it at a lower price and didn't ration the amount per customer, one of those customers would likely just buy out your stock and price gouge with it themselves.
Realistically? I do not trust anyone from another country to put American people's health and safety before their own wallet, especially not a member of a society that is specifically well-known for in-group preference and negative outgroup bias and has a caste system where many, if not all of them, inherently see themselves as "better people" than others. I guarantee you they're not thinking of the intricacies of this situation as much as you might like to think they are.
I would be willing to bet that if another Indian went to the register and paid with cash, they'd get a steep discount.
Nah. They'll get a discount but not a steep one unless they're somehow related. Asians hate giving steep discounts
Considering its the South the only Indias in any town all own gas stations.
So if he is coming to that guy to buy gas, its because he is taking it back to his own to sell it for markup.
Yeah realistically it has the same problem cash fines for lawbreakers has: all it means is if you're wealthy enough the law simply no longer applies to you. Because a normal person can't afford $500 for a speeding ticket, a rich person has a lawyer on retainer who just handles it and the rich person doesn't even have to think about it. It doesn't ration for usage, it rations for economic privilege.
Imagine a ship sinking and someone grabs all the life jackets and locks them up unless you pay him for one. According to lolberts this is not just expected but commendable.
The higher prices would incentivise people to ship that stuff in, ending the crisis sooner. Price controls prolong the crisis, there’s nothing to be gained by bringing it in.
I don’t like it being a foreigner doing so, but the theory is sound.
It isn't being shipped in because the roads are impassible.
Your jewish logic is if there's 50 life jackets on a sinking ship holding 100 people, that it's okay to auction them off because it will incentivize someone manufacturing more. Except the ship is sinking. You aren't getting more.
I used to live in Florida, and I've been through a few hurricanes and the inevitable "Gas station price gouging?" headlines that followed. No investigation ever turned up anything. It's economics, and it's what you get when a city effectively attempts to transfer its gasoline reserves from gas stations to vehicles at a large scale and rapid pace.
I bet the same people who always equate price hikes to gouging are the same people who would have their families top off every vehicle parked at the same house, fill plastic bags with extra gas (yes, I've seen videos of people doing this), then use their precious gas to go on drivable roads for a post-storm sight seeing tour.
Its also always the people with cheap generators that burn a gallon+ per hour to keep their whole house turned on to return to their normal lives.
I'm not even gonna argue about the effectiveness of whatever choice. Fleecing people in crisis is anti-social behavior. It's treating people as a resource, not as your people. Now obviously this street shitter sees whites as nothing more than resources, but under lolbert beliefs, that's true of all people. They don't believe anyone is part of a people to whom you have some reciprocal duty to, it's just every man for himself (and then incoherent rambling as to why just breaking his legs and stealing his shit is the exception).
Of course that's just the way the world is. It's not as if this dude growing a soul and acting honorably would make anything better. There's probably ten more people who are just as happy to fleece him, and his behavior won't change that at all. Being selfless is a losing play in a world filled with people like him. Doesn't mean I won't hope he gets robbed though, and I'm certainly not going to be a lolbert and make up bullshit as to why it's actually okay.
This is the issue. Either there's a moral code we all subscribe to or there isn't. The law is a poor substitute, as it's written by the wealthy and powerful, which is why a lot of immoral behavior that those in power do isn't criminalized (predatory lending, rent seeking, Congress trading stocks with advance knowledge of legislation, etc.).
This circles back around to small government, smaller states, and high trust populations. If you are a moral people with a small enough population, you can subsist with a smaller government because the people treat each other like an extended genetic family. This falls apart the moment it scales large enough to introduce “diversity”, and then you need draconian government to migrate the inevitable racial/ethnic strife.
this term needs to be taken out back and shot. the reason he can charge that much is because he got his station up and running before anyone else. he's probably the only one able to provide gas for miles, and he advertises the price accordingly.
be grateful that someone can provide gas so soon after a disaster, or go somewhere else.
Or just kill him and take it? Why not? Do you think he laid his own power lines to power the pumps? Someone else did that and he didn't pay them. So they work to deliver that so he can extract value without adding any.
the station pays the electrical bill, yes
He paid a usage fee. Did that include rebuilding all the infrastructure? By your shithead logic his next power bill should be about $380,000 right?
Or is that NOT FAIR? But what he's doing is magically fair because """""reasons"""""
What about all the VOLUNTEERS who helped with that effort? Do you think it was only the works of the power company? That not a single road they travelled on was from a volunteer? Or what about lineman sent in from places like Florida?
You are why lolberts get bullets.
This is a discussion after every single literal hurricane that has ever happened of any major merit. Including all the Journohawks and Grifter youtubers hopping in to moralize and treat it like some horrific crime that they cannot believe. Literally, it happens every like 3 years in at least one of the States and has been for as long as I've been alive.
But the majority of people buying gas after a hurricane are trying to power a generator. Generators are not effecient devices, nor are they cheap. Anyone who wants to use one will need a shit ton of gas, meaning the demand has suddenly sky rocketed to levels that cannot be kept up with (and resupply is almost certainly a struggle given the flooding and other damages).
Price raising is in effect rationing it to the customer, because now people will only buy a smaller amount and leave some for the next guy. If kept at normal prices, the first 3 guys in line would just buy out the entire supply to keep their lights on while the entire town is in darkness.
Because the other event that always happens is that gas stations have mile long lines for the gas pumps, which means pre-emptive rationing likely failed for a lot of people who just couldn't afford the time to wait an entire day in line hoping it didn't run out.
And because the resupply trucks are slower, more in demand everywhere, and often cannot even access many gas stations, that means after Day 1 when he gets record profits, the gas station owner is now making 0$ for however many days it takes to get a new supply. Balancing out that dollar gain.
Basically, its a complex issue that has a lot of working factors of which greed is only a portion. And because of that people who don't live in the South should shut the fuck up and stay out of things they don't understand.
Instead the one guy who has money buys it all out instead and the everyday normal people get nothing. Wow, "rationing"!
Most gas stations, if topped off, are holding onto around 30k gallons of gas. Anyone who can buy and store (a very limiting factor as most people won't have a tanker truck to drive it home with) that much isn't living in the South or without a plan to have gas delivered to them directly.
So my numbers weren't smart. Its more like the first 400 guys might buy out the entire supply and leave the rest of the 600 waiting in line for nothing. Either way, its a side effect not a goal I think anyone is actually planning for (I doubt the gas man cares or is smart enough to think of that).
But I also can't feel much sympathy for post-hurricane panic buyers, because they do this with everything and then resell it themselves for 3x what his mega price already was, as you mentioned happening elsewhere in your other comment. And in the case of gas its 90% of the time for luxury use to "return to normalcy" a few days ahead of everyone else. Generators are not efficient devices and, since the roads are usually destroyed or closed and work/school is shutdown, that's almost the entire goal of people buying gas at those times.
Again though, I don't think its fully right for gas stations to do that nor will I actually go to bat for him if he gets angry customers over it. Only that its a much more complex issue than "gas business evil" and that people from outside hurricane country shouldn't try to moralize in their ignorance.
Preemptive rationing would be limiting the number of gallons per customer?
People were unable to ration ahead of time because of the biggest limited resource of all, time. This is especially a problem in areas that don't get hurricanes regularly, because they don't have full storages setup prior and by the time they know to need it, everyone else also does, and then need dozens of different things to survive (gas is the bottom of that list for anyone with a brain).
Every major hurricane has mile long lines at every single gas station for days. Which means you need someone with no job to sit in that line and hope that they get there before it runs out.
If you physically ration it, then you waste a large amount of time arguing with people who will fight and push against it all day which limits the amount of people who get gas. If you price raise it, then people are forced to ration themselves and get out faster, which increases the amount of gas that goes around.
While also maintaining the gas station's profit margin to keep it open. Because they will absolutely be taking huge losses on Day 2 when they have no fucking gas left and nobody is coming by for anything else because they are locked in their house. That big injection gets bled out for days until life returns to normal and the supply chain gets sorted and they make a much smaller profit, if any at all.
Again, its a complex issue with a lot going on that is a lot bigger than "those fucking Indians are screwing us!" and "lolberts."
Gas, unlike food and water and supplies, also has a very short shelf life. Even with stabilizer it's probably going bad after six months and is bad after a year.
This exact thing happened after the Sandy Hook fake ammo shortage. Retired faggot Boomers would camp at Walmart and literally dump the shelf in their cart when it stocked and immediately resell it for 4x the cost.
They introduced zero value to the system. They didn't facilitate distribution, they didn't increase the supply of ammo.
These behaviors made it worse because the perception of a shortage made everybody want to buy more than they normally would because "I might not be able to get some later".
I wonder what their rebuttals would be if the owners were white 🤔
Lolbertarians: that’s his right, and no government should interfere!
Lolbertarians: government, help me!
The same, from me. I saw White gun owners savagely fuck over each other in the post Sandy Hook ammo shortage... and the shortage was completely artificial. The supply of ammo was utterly unchanged. The exact same number of rounds produced in 2012 was the same as in 2011. This fake shortage went on for three years where .223, normally 0.30¢ / rd, was going for $1.50.
In disaster situations like this one if this gas station owner's body were found in a ditch with his skull caved in the police if they're even around wouldn't give it a second glance over the hundreds of dead bodies in ditches they've already seen.
Under those extraordinary circumstances different substitution effects (eg. killing/robbing the owner and taking the gas may be "cheaper" than just paying for the gas) are in play, and a useful economic model needs to take them into account.
I suppose an argument could be made for either. The problem is that these "lolberts" are not arguing in good faith, neither are the pooskins operating in good faith. They see it as a crisis to exploit. This is how foreigners operate, as they have not assimilated, nor do they have any desire to.
It's price gouging. 15k per fine, and there would be enough people in that video to bankrupt the gas station owner.
You can limit the amount people can buy up to a certain amount of fuel, but you can't up the price.
t: lived through the gas rationing in the late 70s and early 80s, and that's how it was done. if your plate started with an even number, or the first number of the plate, you got the even days of the week (tuesday thursday saturday), if your plate stared with an odd number, you got the odd numbered days.(monday, wednesday, friday, sunday) If you tried to get fuel when you were not supposed to, you were told to leave. They had armed guards.
I lived through the toilet paper rationing of 2020, and I wished there was "price gouging". Instead, every store with a "one pack per person" policy was bare because the Mexicans and their extended families stood in line early in the morning and bought out the entire stock every time a shipment came in.
It's definitely going to be awhile. Weeks or maybe a month or more.
When the gas wars were around, we got 10 gallons. or two large jerry cans. That's what you were allowed to get. No more. They would turn the pump off on you and only turn it back on for the next person.
It absolutely sucked, but everyone got a little. For as long the fuel lasted.
If the gas station owner can't refill his tanks then there's not a competitive marketplace and he's price gouging, basically extorting his customers.
Selling his cache of gasoline at extortion prices isn't what should cover his down time - that's what insurance is for - it's to abuse people in need.
Of course the line between taking profits and gouging is large and nebulous, which is why only the most egregious cases should be prosecuted.
Its literal dwindling supply driving up demand. Its the most basic form of capitalism on full display.
"Supply and demand" describes an equilibrium. It's a differential equation, where supply and demand are interrelated.
When supply is cut off (gas station owner can't get more gas) you're no longer talking about a capitalist economy under supply and demand; you're talking about a disaster economy, where the primary thing you want to solve for is avoiding collapse of social norms and law and order not abstract efficiency.
A gas station owner saying "I'm going to dick over you guys because I can" is little different from joggers looting stores: there's a supply of zero-cost goods so it's economically sound to loot them.
That's a lot of fancy words to try and talk your way around the fact that the literal supply is dropping to near zero, which is driving up the literal demand and the price reflects accordingly.
But considering you already tried the "they have insurance!" line people used to defend niggers just a few short years ago, its clear you just think its (D)ifferent when its something you don't like.
Fancy words? It's not a difficult concept to understand.
Economically speaking why should a person not take free goods? Of course they should. The same reasoning is why station owners can't sell at huge markups - not because the demand isn't there, but because we don't allow it. This is why we don't base everything on capitalism.
You can't answer this simple question because it shows your ideas are morally wrong.
Its not difficult, its just trying to dodge what I said by pulling it into increasingly complex discussions. Its the the classic MO of someone who caught themselves in cognitive dissonance and is trying to run around it.
Because the long term consequences of doing such is the business closes down and then the neighborhood is left without any access to such goods. As we see happening across most ghettos.
For the same reason the gas guy is making 0$ for the other 6 days of the week after his entire supply is emptied because the entire chain is disrupted and he will be needing those increased profits during the first day to offset that.
There is no morality needed, which is why I didn't deny the gas guy is still probably a shit. Its basic logic and reasoning. Helped by the fact that I've lived through dozens of hurricanes and can verify my position with actual experience instead of "well philosophically speaking" nonsense.
Yeah but it let him whine about how somehow wanting to be paid makes you equal to niggers who steal.
How can we defeat such well thought out logical thinkers?
Why start the discussion calling people who don't want price controls lolberts? Looks like the guy was being sarcastic anyway and he would most likely support government-run gas stations.
You can't stop economics. You can slow the market's reaction though. So it might make sense to legislate a buffer zone in price increases - where any maximum price hike per day is based on the area average. Then hopefully the effects of "gouging" are slowed a bit thru the disaster period. Most states do already have tons of regulation on gas stations including price controls. Otherwise you'd have digital gas price signs fluctuating by the hour as the current oil futures index changed. You'd start pumping gas and the price would change before you finish. I guess an actual lolbert would be ok with that.
I'm a little tilted against lolberts and their arguments from past experience, but yeah I didn't check that guy's profile.
I was more thinking about what's moral for a private gas station owner, but your idea makes sense. Sidenote, Texas punished price gouging in 2019.
There are a lot of backwoods to dig a deep grave in the area, and these are people with long memories. It will not pay off in the long run.
Yeah. I guess the best I can say is that you could do a lot worse than $10/gal
So the other positive aspect of "gouging" is that it encourages other people to also sell that as it's so profitable to do so. If you owned a helicopter for example, at a certain price you would make money by filling bladders with fuel and flying them in.
I'm for "gouging" for no other reason than there's no other word to describe it without the emotive label of "gouging"
And for reference, here in Aus, fuel normally ranges from the equivalent price of $5.86 to $8.36 per gallon. Diesel is normally about 10 to 15% more expensive.
There's also a hard cap on the price where it just becomes more feasible to kill the owner.
This problem is solved with a high trust local economy where everybody know who “Fred the gas station owner” is and where he lives.
Deport the pajeets —> remove shit from the streets.
Easy
Price Gouging helps on both managing the demand, and resolving supply.
Demand
Sometimes, an area won't be hit that bad hurricane and won't see too much increased demand. Other times, an area will be hit very very bad, and rarely places will need to allocate gas to only critical demand from the start.
How can you make sure gas sometimes gets to critical demand, and other times only gets rationed slightly or not at all? Freely set prices solves this automatically, while rationing needs a whole fucking algorithm to resolve (which might not even be something that people on the ground can check). Rationing also always disincentivizes at least one group on the ground to not prepare for next time (eg, if rationing is per person, then average people are disincentivized from keeping gas cans. If rationing is 100% critical, key institutions are disincentivized from storing because gas stations become their personal backup storage).
Supply
Sometimes, you can wait for gas supply to be resolved naturally, other times you need to exert a little more effort to fix things, and rarely you need to make extraordinary responses.
How do you know when you should spend extra money to do this? Solving it requires an entire government agency, and as we saw in Katrina that agency is shit. Gouging is messy and not everyone prices optimally, but they are highly motivated so they try what they can think of and the problem gets fixed eventually as the market finds what is most efficient.
...Pretty sure criticizing someone for hiking prices after a disaster and suggesting a better way for stations to ration fuel is a free market concept as well, so long as the government doesn't get involved, but hey, whatever...
In economic theory, when demand is increased (by mass travel), and available supply is decreased (by a natural disaster), market equilibrium will be found at a higher price point, though the change in quantity sold will vary by conditions.
The thought is, even if a product becomes more scarce, new sellers could viably enter the market with the increased price to meet some of the demand. And the new price will push out some consumers who don't have the funds or desire to pay so much.
In a perfect market, yes, the increased pricing would serve as the best means of rationing. The thing is, ideal conditions would have similar, alternative products available and no barriers to enter the marketplace. As it stands, the gas station may hold a monopoly in the local area and is causing societal harm by jacking the prices up.
Arguments in favor of capitalism and competition, in a general sense, posit that the economic "battle" will, through a sort of Darwinism, gradually create value in the system.
For example, a competitor, wanting to take some of the capital flowing in the system, will create a more efficient way to produce a good with less overhead, resulting in a lower price and have created a better process. Maybe he has a new machine... Value was added because engineers were paid to design it, a manufacturer made it, etc. The money moves to benefit everyone.
Free market capitalism doesn't work when an economy gets upended to the extent where no value can be found to be added to the system.
For example, during the ammo shortages, assholes had friends at Walmart call them when the truck showed up. They'd sweep all the ammo into their cart and immediately resell it for triple the price.
There is no value added to the system. The ammo availability is unchanged. Buying from Walmart for retail price distributes the same quantity of ammo, of the same quality, except it costs three times more... And that expense doesn't go into the supply chain, it goes in to the pocket of a completely worthless "middleman".
In theory you could do this with anything. Open up a grocery store in a small town and buy every single food item off the truck of the local grocer leaving their shelves empty and then sticking your own for double. It's unfeasible on that scale, but technically doable. There is no value. The supply chain doesn't benefit. The grocery reseller is introducing nothing to the economy.
And in this case, you will actively harm people because they can't get food.
Selling the gas you already had delivered a week ago for exorbitant prices introduces no value and actively causes harm.
Price gouging is good because it allows you to fund people actually bringing in more of that supply into the area.
That's the definition of price gouging. When the supply cuts, and demand spikes, what else is supposed to happen?
I remember the TN state police arrested a man who was "price gouging" hand sanitizer in NY, physically driving it to them for $35 a bottle.
The police arrested him, he was sent to prison, they confiscated his truck and the bottles and did nothing with the hand sanitizer. NY residents who needed it didn't get it. Cops in TN who had no need of it, got years of supply by theft.
That is the purpose of anti-price gouging laws.
This is a libertarian position, not a lolbert one. If a community wants guaranteed access to an affordable resource, they should negotiate that in advance. Lolbert is believing in open borders or free speech for those who actively suppress it.
You can argue that people using their state's monopoly on force to create anti price gouging laws was an advance negotiation by the community. :)
Local government, maybe. State government or even county, hell no
Wow. Costs almost as much as gas costs in the UK on a normal day!
I'm only being a little facetious here, it's almost 8 US bucks a gallon (give or take a bit of exchange rate) in the UK right now, with no disasters, no horrors except the existential one of living in London.
My view is this: This dude theoretically owns this gas station. He likely, like everyone else, lives in the area affected (business moguls from overseas don't tend to own gas stations, they own oil rigs). Which means he needs money to repair not only his house, but also his gas station! Insurance money doesn't come quick, if at all (sorry, "act of god", no money for you!).
In a free market, you can just go to another gas station. You have a car, and you're buying gas to use in your fucking 10-gallons-per-hour generator so you can stream netflix, not to survive. And the ones that aren't doing that... Are buying the gas so they can fleece and price gouge other people! Wait, the other gas stations are all out of gas, sold out by those resellers? Massive shortages? Womp womp. Looks like that system didn't work out.
More important than all of that, though, is the concept of Fairness: The money this gas station makes is this man's employment. If you were just in a hurricane, house wrecked, and get a call from your employer saying "you're now literally the only one who can do this job, I know it's dangerous in the weather and debris, but come into work. Also, I'm only paying half your normal salary, get fucked son, I expect you here at 8am.", you'd get pretty angry, wouldn't you? But that's what you're asking of this business owner. You're telling him to show up for his job, despite the dangerous environs and trouble at home, and to earn far less money than he should doing so.
Or the PM or anyone else suggesting something might happen leading to that very thing happening as David Cameron did some years ago when he advised/warned/fucked up telling the public they might want to top up just in case.
Cue panic buying and stations running out of petrol for no fucking reason.