Hurricane Dorian makes landfall likely in South Carolina after devastating the Bahamas and doing a lot of water damage to the coast of Florida. There are reports of $4 cases of water selling for $9. This is price gouging and is officially considered a violation of unfair or deceptive trade practices law.
Price gouging is a term referring to when a seller spikes the prices of goods, services or commodities to a level much higher than is considered reasonable or fair, and is considered exploitative, potentially to an unethical extent.
A year ago, I made a post reporting price gouging when Hurricane Michael, a category 5 hurricane made landfall in Florida and price gouging was rampant. @spectrumecons our resident economist pointed out that :
"Price gouging is a very narrow minded short term strategy. Disasters do not last forever. People will remember exploitative behaviour. A better long-term strategy is help out at the lower prices and even make a loss in order to build a reputation for philanthropy."
In response and in spirit of debate, my take is this :
The key to understanding why laws against price gouging are a bad idea is first understanding that 1) good intentions do not automatically create good outcomes, and 2) prices are a signal about how much supply their is compared to the demand, and 3) people respond to that signal even if they don't understand what it really means.
Economics is a moral science. It's about the material well-being of society and how that is best attained. And the argument against anti-price gouging laws is a moral argument about how we best ensure people can get what they need, sometimes what they desperately need, in a crisis.
Think of it this way: for the person who needs plywood to protect their homes, expensive plywood is better than no plywood at all because another person responded to a low price by buying extra "just to be on the safe side." And if more is needed than is currently available, expensive plywood shipped in because a high price stimulated more supply is better than no plywood because a low price provided little incentive to undertake extra efforts to bring in more.
You can pretend to care for people by supporting good sounding but ineffective policies - merely symbolic - or you can seriously care for people by supporting policies that accomplish the real goal, even if they don't sound noble.
At a disaster time, I think price gouging is not moral.
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Hey you remembered a comment I made a long time ago. I still feel the same way. You can argue about price being representative of demand and supply but price can also be representative of game theory and long term profit maximisation. We could make a similar argument about firms making donations to charity or absorbing higher costs of being green. Perception has value and some people have long memories.
I noticed you have been downvoted by a bot. Downvoting using delegated Steem Power that was intended for vote selling seems a little questionable. At the moment delegation involves both upvote and downvote mana pools. Separating them might make sense. Maybe a suggestion for the next hardfork.
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Not only does content indifferent voting and support of that practice ultimately harm the system, it is a farce that the very same people take the moral high ground and use their down votes to attack in the name of securing a better steem.
Support proof of brain and content creators. Out with the bid bot shit and anyone who thinks they can proxy self vote by delegating to them.
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Delegation to bots has dropped a little. Below are two screenshots. One is from about 2 weeks ago and the other I took just now.
Source: Steem Reports accessed 25/08/2019
Source: Steem Reports accessed 09/09/2019
It is surprising that it hasn't dropped by more considering vote selling is down. This is a likely indication that many delegating Steem are simply not around.
For proof of brain to be successful we need more decentralisation. Leaving it in the hands of just a few very powerful users is not going to produce the best results. The good news is we have made quite a bit progress in the past 2 years. Steemit Inc selling all that Steem has hurt the price but it has allowed for smaller investors to come in. Sadly, some of those came just to sell votes.
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