Just in Time for Halloween!

[paft.livejournal.com]

I suppose it’s appropriate that we get this truly scary, fanged, and drooling glimpse of the face of modern capitalism on October 31st. CNBC Senior Editor John Carney has decided to weigh in on the subject of price gouging during a disaster.

What’s striking is the bland cluelessness, a level of naivete that, feigned or not, borders on the murderous. After pointing out that, once a few of these layabouts experience having to pay, say, $100 for a case of bottled water, they’ll have received a salutary lesson in being prepared for disaster, Carney observes:

One objection is that a system of free-floating, legal gouging would allow the wealthy to buy everything and leave the poor out altogether. But this concern is overrated. For the most part, price hikes during disasters do not actually put necessary goods and services out of reach of even the poorest people. They just put the budgets of the poor under additional strain.

Right. The poor never have to do without “necessary goods and services” in normal times, so they certainly won’t have to do without them during disasters like floods and hurricanes! For the most part, anyway. And if a few poor people are unlucky enough not to be part of that “most,” seeing a few bodies of neighbors who’ve died from hypothermia or thirst will teach the rest of those lazy beggars a lesson about the dangers of overconsumption!

Carney apparently believes the plight of many people during a disaster is about dickering over prices rather than access to resources that could save lives. “This is a problem better resolved,” he declares, “through transfer payments to alleviate the household budgetary effects of the prices after the fact, rather than trying to control the price in the first place.”

Of course, this is only going to help those people who managed to survive in a "marketplace" where the prices of goods are jacked up to the point where they end up having to choose what live-saving goods to purchase. Potable water? Uncontaminated food? Dry warm blankets? Hey, if you can't afford all of them that's just now how the marketplace works, buddy, and if you or a member of your family ends up not making it because you chose wrong, those are the Randian breaks.

Surely the transfer payment you get later will compensate for having to watch them die.

But wait! There's more! Carney has followed this post up with another mentioning merchants giving away perishable goods, in which he asks:

Clearly, people could pay market prices for the perishing goods. Does the fact that they aren't mean consumers are gouging merchants? Should this be illegal?

Is this man from another planet?

*

Comments

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Oh, right, you only said "Command Economy" which is just what these men were actually advocating and directing. You want to eat beef without butchering your cow.

I see already that discussing things with you is futile and that your telling PAFT she has a superiority complex is fucking hilarious. Pot, meet kettle.

I'm simply noting to you that command economies mean collectivization, the Gosplan, the giant Freudian parades. You're not wanting to accept that, fine. But don't expect not to be called out on this watering down of words. I do this with people who say "X is Hitler" so I'm in no contradiction of my own distaste for the one to do the same with "X is Communism."

In most people's political lexicon, command economies are communist. If you're so poorly read as to not know this, you're under no obligation to be treated with any more respect than you fail to show to others in the midst of flinging enough shit at others with the hope some of it will stick.

[notmrgarrison.livejournal.com]

If you're so poorly read as to not know this, you're under no obligation to be treated with any more respect than....

Seriously lame.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Well, since she finds fit to use complaints about what meanies others are with what they say, and to accuse people who are noting what words actually mean of not knowing anything, she's perfectly open to this kind of counterattack. Someone whose idea of proving a point is using the direct mirror of the arguments of the other person, in what is by all indications perfect seriousness has absolutely zero grounds to state such things. And you're right, it is lame for someone to accuse others of approving of mass murder without knowing what they're talking about when they're doing that. It is lame to accuse people who don't want to pay an arm and a leg during a crisis of approving of the Gulag and mass starvation and human suffering, and to use this as rhetoric complaining about someone else supposedly doing the exact same thing.

[mahnmut.livejournal.com]

I think you're beginning to lose it again.

[politikitty.livejournal.com]

And price controls are an element of socialist economies.

A truly free market capitalist system would not have price controls.

A mixed economy might have price controls, but that is no evidence that they are good policy. A mixed economy by definition has elements of a perfectly free capitalist system and elements of a socialist system.

Am I not allowed to ellucidate which system we borrowed price controls? By that definition you should never be able to mention libertarianism since it's a system that does not work and would lead to similar human suffering that communism has led to.

You have done nothing to argue that price controls are a good thing that reduces human suffering. Neither has paft. But that's her decision.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

They aren't but one element of a COMMAND economy. The command economy regulates supply, demand, wages, prices, and production. Soviet-style Communism of the North Korean variety is the literal assuming by the state and uncontrolled, unaccountable bureaucrats of regulation of every aspect of the economy. Prices are only one element and the least problematic. You're going off on a completely different level from where the issue should be. Paft is doing the same thing.

This is not economics, this is the simple result of the breakdown of order: without the iron hand of the state, the strong fleece the weak. That's simply how societies operate.