re: "Price Gouging" during a disaster: Good or Bad

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I don't think anyone is trying to refute free market principles in a day to day practice. We're arguing over disasters.

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The laws of economics don't suspend themselves just because people are feeling sad about a disaster. There are poor, hurting people who have less money than they need for essentials in every American city every day. Socialist price control policies hurt more than they help then, and they don't magically work better now because there is a spike in suffering. Becoming a Marxist and denying economic law in the aftermath in a hurricane won't fix anything more than denying gravity will help you if you jump off of a building.

Are you trying compare situations of an economic market in shambles opposed to one that's not?

That's odd.

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Not sure what you mean by that.

Were on a message board arguing over why people standing on the theoretical free market disaster condition hill are either right or wrong.

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You said that nobody gives a shite about economic policy when there's a disaster.

Clearly some people do, and clearly it matters, as we're sitting here discussing it in a 9 page long thread.

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Anti-price gouging laws are about ethics and morality, not economics.

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Yes, they're about ethics and morality, at the expense of economic impact. Socialists who want price control legislation in everyday normal life say the exact same thing.

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But it won't triple or quadruple the price prior to the impact on supply. That's gouging.

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If there were no impact on supply (and don't forget demand!) then price gouging would be impossible to benefit from because someone could just go to the other gas station. Abundant supply = competition = low prices required to make sales. A run on gasoline that results in higher prices is a result of increased demand. Economics still applies...

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That's why it's called "gouging", a word that has moral not economic connotations.

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Is it called that because that's what it is, or is it called that because that's what the people who agreed with the legislation and pushed it wanted to call it, to frame it in a narrative that makes people like you empathize with it and support it?

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So let's say tomorrow a horribly lethal disease starts to rapidly decimate our population. They come up with a vaccination that will prevent you and your loved ones from perishing, but because they only have produced 100,000 doses, they decide to charge a price per dose that is more than 95% of the population can afford. Two questions. Would you think it is fair that only the wealthy would survive? Would you think it moral that only the wealthy would survive? Economically speaking, it would be fair. But if you say it would be morally ok, you're either rich, don't have children, or a liar.

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Economically speaking, your question is retarded. First, if they only produced 100,000 doses to artificially create scarcity to drive up the cost of the vaccine, they'd be acting against their own interests because they could make more money by manufacturing more vaccine to sell to a larger amount of the population, a population who would be willing to literally pay anything they can possibly come up with to survive. Second, if they only produced 100,000 doses because that's what they were capable of, then implementing price controls would not only not create more vaccine, it would only make it that much harder to produce more vaccine by constraining their resources and thus ability to do so.

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You're over thinking life my friend. You think life is about all the wrong things. That's cool, and only my opinion, which is worth nothing to you. Just for the record, I'm not a socialist or a liberal. I'm just a guy who is up in age and has had life teach me some hard lessons in what is important and what isn't. I'll just leave it at that.

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What exactly do you think that I think life is about? Money? You've got me all wrong. I'm just a broke guy in my late 20s who would go over to Houston in a heartbeat and help people out with no expectation of anything in return if I had the extra time and enough money to take off of work to do so, because my family lost everything in Katrina and I know how it goes. But I'm also a nerd who reads economics texts for fun in my spare time, and despite greed and selfishness driving capitalism, the capitalist free market system is the most efficient, beneficial system for everyone. People do get hurt under it, but when regulation is introduced, even more people get hurt through unintended consequences founded on good intentions. A disaster doesn't change that. The reality of our lives is that people do get hurt, and never in our lifetimes will we see a utopia where nobody ever gets hurt.

I know you're not a liberal or a socialist, but socialists fight for what they genuinely believe will help the most hurt people in our society, even though they fail to realize their policies would hurt more people. And in this moment of disaster, it appears to me you are willing to go that way because you empathize with the pain of the people of Houston.