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.
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.
You need proof of niggers behaving like niggers?
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.
Almost no one that owns anything has any skills necessary to maintain civilization.
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.
Your first sentence is absurd beyond conception: an economy is the conceptualized aggregate of exchanges. Are you saying that after a catastrophe, humans no longer need or want? Of course we do and the natural and normal homo sapien way to address want and need is to share among our own and trade with the others.
Also hahaha good luck w that logic when your bills for that month arrive.