There were a lot of comments in my post Why I am no longer a Libertarian that I decided I would respond to with a new post.
It is best, perhaps, if I explained my overarching philosophy and why I became a Libertarian, and then partially why I left Libertarianism.
I do not like to abide seeing those with power abuse or take advantage of those without power.
I believe that society functions best when people live according to the golden rule: do unto others as you would want them to do unto you.
It is a very simple philosophy, putting it into practice is much harder.
It was the first part of my philosophy that guided me into Libertarianism. I wanted to keep those in political power in check.
This is why I am a gun owner and fundamentally believe in the Second Amendment. If power ever gets too abusive, I want the tools to fight back.
One of the reasons I started to Leave Libertarianism is that power comes in many forms. Political power is one form, violence is another, and money is a thrid.
Curbing political power is critical. Hence the importance of a Constitution that limits power and court system that enforces those limits. Then gun rights as a last resort.
Violence as power is also a reason why I am a supporter of gun rights. When the thug who lacks the moral compunction against hurting someone to take their property attacks me for my wallet, I want the tools to fight him off.
But what about money as power. More than just the ability to buy political influence. This has been the core of many of my posts about the “McKinsey effect” where top executives who have the economic power to destroy lives for their own profit, do it.
Price gouging is a part of this. Sure, John Stossel can say that with anti-gouging laws some guy won’t fill his truck and trailer with water and generators and drive down to where a twister just happened to magnanimously sell his wares for profit. But as far as I can find, those stories are anecdotal. Looking into price gouging, it seems that the vast majority of people prosecuted are independent store or bodega owners who the day before it was announced the hurricane would hit were selling water for $0.99 a gallon and the day after it was announced were selling the same water from the same inventory for $9.99 per gallon.
These are individuals who suddenly came into power due to an upset and their first thought is “now I have the upper hand so I’m going to fuck everyone I can out of as much money as I can before things return to normal.”
This guy might not be a CEO or politician but his sudden rise to power and desire to abuse it is the same.
One of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen in my life was the Cajun Navy. People who volunteered to rescue people stranded off rooftops after Hurricane Katrina.
I was still in college when that happened and remember my Libertarian friends saying those people really should be charging those they rescued. I cannot imagine anything uglier than a guy with a fishing boat pulling up to a house with people on the roof saying “you can get in the boat if you hand over your jewelry and cash.” I’m glad it didn’t happen.
The first thing to remember is that the economy is not a society. There are more important things than money. He who dies with the most stuff doesn’t win.
While the cold hyper-rational economic arguments for price gouging might make sense in an academic setting, what it also creates is social strife and misery.
The grandmother on a fixed income may not have the ability to store large amounts of gasoline or water in advance, or maybe a tree fell on the shed she stored it in and her stockpile was ruined. Letting the gas station owner gouge her might make him temporarily rich, but it also makes her grandson want to cave in his head with a hammer.
So much of what I saw in the Libertarian movement was “I got mine, you can go fuck yourself.” It was selfish and mean spirited.
I don’t think the government can fix most problems. I believe the private sector is far better at managing society. But at the same time, I believe that government is necessary to curb some market abuses. I have no desire to go back to the days of the traveling patent medicine shows or getting paid in script at the company store.
I want to live in a pleasant society where people generally treat each other decently and those who have power, even if it is fleeting and due to some freak incident, do not use that power to take advantage of others.
If that means that the government has to temporarily level the playing field in a crisis by imposing rules, that’s part of living in a civil society that tries to minimize strife. It’s a matter of balancing different powers against one another to come up with the lightest touch that creates an equilibrium in which a polite and civil society can flourish.
Miguel reminded me earlier of what Ayn Rand had to say on this topic:
All kinds of people today call themselves “libertarians,” especially something calling itself the New Right, which consists of hippies who are anarchists instead of leftist collectivists; but anarchists are collectivists. Capitalism is the one system that requires absolute objective law, yet libertarians combine capitalism and anarchism. That’s worse than anything the New Left has proposed. It’s a mockery of philosophy and ideology. They sling slogans and try to ride on two bandwagons. They want to be hippies, but don’t want to preach collectivism because those jobs are already taken. But anarchism is a logical outgrowth of the anti-intellectual side of collectivism. I could deal with a Marxist with a greater chance of reaching some kind of understanding, and with much greater respect. Anarchists are the scum of the intellectual world of the Left, which has given them up. So the Right picks up another leftist discard. That’s the libertarian movement.
For the record, I shall repeat what I have said many times before: I do not join or endorse any political group or movement. More specifically, I disapprove of, disagree with and have no connection with, the latest aberration of some conservatives, the so-called “hippies of the right,” who attempt to snare the younger or more careless ones of my readers by claiming simultaneously to be followers of my philosophy and advocates of anarchism. Anyone offering such a combination confesses his inability to understand either. Anarchism is the most irrational, anti-intellectual notion ever spun by the concrete-bound, context-dropping, whim-worshiping fringe of the collectivist movement, where it properly belongs.
I have to agree. So much of what I read in the comments just seems like economic anarchy.
And just because I believe that some bodega owner shouldn’t be able to say “there was a run on milk yesterday so when I get my new stock in this morning I’m going to up the price ten times today,” that doesn’t make me Hitler.
Gov’t (ideally) as impartial, role limited, referee, correct?
Exactly.
J. Kb, thanks for the follow up.
I want to address this in both theory and practical.
First, price gouging can only take place in a situation with artificial shortages.
Second, good people do good things and most of the time that takes care of those that are in actual need.
Third: Bad people do bad things and we have to be able to deal with those bad things.
Forth: In no case should policy be based on individual stories.
Your friends in collage were absolutely correct, the Cajun Navy should have charged for rescues. And you know what? They DID. They charged exactly as much as they wanted to, which is ZERO. Your friends in collage missed the fact that it was an exchange of services for value. It just happened to be a value that they did not approve of. Your friends in collage were of poor moral character.
So now we come to the two examples, gas, needed by many people and one little old lady that will have a poor out come without gas.
Situation 1) There is only one source of gas. That single source of gas jacks the price of gas to $20/gal. Little old lady dies because she can’t afford the gas.
Counter 1: We aren’t living in a third world shit hole. There is another source of gas down the road a little way selling gas at $10/gal. And those little shits are going to be running down to the place selling it for $10/gal and bringing back 5 gal cans of it and selling it for $15/gal.
Counter 2: We aren’t all evil people, I’ll give her a couple of gallons or a little cash so she can buy gas. Unless I also need that gas to avoid a negative out come for my family.
Counter 3: If there is a shortage of gas, and I have a 5 gal can of the stuff, can I offer it to the highest bidder? “Hey, 5 gals of gas to the highest bidder?” I need that cash for my own reasons. They need the gas, for their own reasons. Why can’t I trade my gas for their cash so I can use that cash to buy the meds I need?
Situation 2) I and my neighbor both use medicine B to keep us alive. A tree falls on his house and destroys his supply. He wants my supply.
Counter 1: I shot his ass as he tries to steel my supply. I need it to stay alive.
Counter 2: He offers me some money but not enough. I refuse to give him some of my supply because I need it to stay alive. He goes to the government and demands they steel my supply to give some of it to him. I die shooting government agents.
Counter 3: I decide that I can charter a helicopter to pick me up at the ball park, take me to the medical supply house in the next state where I can purchase more of the medicine. I offer to sell some of my supply at a price that will not only cover my costs for chartering that helicopter but maybe make a little bit of a profit. He refuses to pay the amount and demands that the government take my supply and give it out to everybody in need. I die shooting government agents.
Counter 4: I don’t tell him I have any. I complain just as loudly as he does about dying without my medicine and demanding that something be done about it.
Counter 5: I wait till his out of his home, drop off a care package with a couple of days worth of the medicine.
Counter 6: He and I share my supply, pray that the government gets things together in time. We die together when my supply runs out. 2 days later a new supply starts to flow.
Counter 7: He comes over, tells me he knows I’ve been stock piling meds for the last 5 years and I can just give him a 30 day supply because it is “the right thing to do”. It’s not like he could have stocked up in alternative locations like I did. He had to buy a new car for his wife.
My point in all of these is that the situation where the two greedy a**holes attempted to create an artificial shortage backfired on them. They are out a bunch of dollars. People that needed the hand sanitizer got it for “free”. People refused to pay the price they were demanding and this in turn caused their plans to fail. Their plan could only have succeeded IF that artificial shortage had continued.
I thought their plan went off the rails when Amazon and eBay pulled their (and others’) listings. It wasn’t that people wouldn’t buy it, it’s that other private businesses denied them access to a national marketplace.
Boris, my lady was following the story. According to her there was a lot of nasty going around. These two managed to insult and upset everybody they were buying from and everybody they were trying to sell to.
And putting their listings up on eBay or Amazon is a great equalizer. Those companies love to give you alternatives at better prices.
Regardless, the government didn’t shut them down. They got shut down because they were acting like douches and the greedy corporations decided not to enable them and then they couldn’t sell locally because they priced themselves right out of the market. Their price included their attitude.
There is a local gun store I don’t like to visit. It isn’t that their prices are that bad, it is just that I don’t like the vib they give off. It is part of the price I would have to pay if I was buying from them.
JKb, you’re an engineer. You should know that your first step in solving a problem is an accurate definition of that problem. IMO, you’ve stated one part of the problem, and jumped to a “solution” that is “clear, simple, and wrong.” (Mencken). Government is legitimized force. It is almost never the best answer, at least in part because those deciding on that use of force are no better than, and often worse than, those behaving in a way of which you disapprove.
As I stated yesterday, you’ve come hard up against John Adams’ statement about our system of government being unsuited for any but a religious and moral people. You’re trying to use government to force people to behave according to Torah. That hasn’t worked for G-d. Why do you expect it to work better for people?
The Cajun Navy was well paid in the currency that mattered most to them–knowing they behaved as menchen (or whatever that translates to in Cajun). It’s the same motivation that gets a local Rotary club to pick up trash along a highway. It’s what got my dad to take my brothers and me to a local hospital, to wash dishes in their kitchen on Christmas, so a few more Christian employees could have the day off. And, it’s the motivation for a neighbor to give that little old lady some gas, or to put her stuff in his refridgerator.
Incidentally, at least one of the papers linked to the “price gouging” articles I linked was a study of the limiting effect of social pressure. The gas station owner is unlikely to raise his price to $20, because it will anger too many of his customers. He’s likely to eat as much of the extra cost (generators to run the pumps, opening the station instead of helping his family, etc.) as he can, and raise the price to perhaps $1 or $2 over his non-emergency price, because, if he angers too many of the locals, they’ll make an effort to buy elsewhere after the emergency.
In short, the problem is unlikely to be as severe as you’ve assumed, and the solution you’ve proposed is likely to have far more “unanticipated negative side-effects” than beneficial effects, all because you’ve failed to think it through past Sowell’s “stage one.”
Finally, I’d have thought that, being a “gun guy,” using government force to “fix” a moral problem would be the LAST place you’d go.
YMMV…
Ivan, thank you. That is a much more concise way of saying what I’ve been trying to say. 1) The government is almost never the right answer 2) OUR society will apply pressures and most will do the “right thing”. 3) Payment isn’t always in cold hard cash. 4) Price gouging isn’t the problem that people make it out to be.
There is a video on YouTube title something like “Socialism Sucks” which is about three guys going down to Cuba and finding out that “yes, socialism sucks.”
One of the things they talk about is getting gas for their rented car. There was only ONE gas station. The line was very long. People were pushing their cars in line in order to conserve gas while waiting to buy gas. People in line were prepared for a long wait, including bringing a picnic lunch.
A “sketchy” dude offered to get them gas at a higher price. (Black Market). They paid for the black market gas. Asked no questions. The bought on the black market because they knew the black market would have the gas in the time frame they wanted and within the budget they had.
Did that sketchy dude gouge them or did he provide a valuable service at a reasonable price?
Ponder this- why don’t the big & successful companies ‘price gouge’ during times of emergency?
No, it’s not just laws and government.
Nor is it ‘woke capitalism’. It’s not because you discovered some mystic law of economic theory that they haven’t ever thought of.
The reason the big & successful companies would rather see the shelves emptied over upping their prices is because they don’t want the hit to their reputations.
People don’t like those who take advantage of emergencies to make a buck. That $10 gotten via inflated prices now is not worth the $100 lost when things go back to normal.
It’s the foolish little outside operators, the people who think they are being clever, and the unsuccessful that try to price gouge.