yeah, I don’t claim to know how the pricing worked behind the scenes. It hasn’t gone up that high, which I find surprising. We never cracked $4 a gallon AFAIK. All I know about that is that, at that price point in a crisis, I’m not at all surprised that 38% of our area stations are completely sold out.
You don’t get to ask this question then accuse me of fighting the hypothetical when I give you the answer. You know the answer, you’re just assuming it isn’t available as part of the debate.
If rationing isn’t an option, then the answer is that you don’t solve the problem, there will be a shortage of gas during a gas crisis. A fraction of the population, from all walks of life, will have to modify their lifestyle to cope, instead of just one group being singled out for making the hard decisions… again.
Given that after Katrina knocked out the same pipeline and then some, plus refineries, and the worst state increase was IIRC NJ at something like $0.65/gal, I think low double digits is still too high.
FWIW states without “gouging” laws saw similar increases to their neighbors with such laws, e.g. NH vs the rest of PADD IA, NM vs PADD III.
It’s not available because the Governor of GA never made it available, and that’s what this debate was about, not a mere hypothetical but a reality. I’m sorry if that doesn’t accommodate the argument you prefer to have, but it’s the situation that actually happened, and I’ve been clear about this from the OP.
I’m just scratching my head trying to understand how people keep trying to make this argument work, after insisting that the working poor cannot possibly make a single adjustment and will certainly experience a calamity (such as job loss) if they can’t drive for work for a few days.
Let’s stipulate that’s true, it’s not much of a stretch. But you know, you absolutely know it doesn’t affect rich people the same way. Don’t pretend otherwise. They can’t get gas? They’ll take a day off work, telecommute, make other arrangements… hell, the richest people have their own fuel pumps at their private residences, they’re not queuing up at the BP station. And you want to pretend this is more equitable than everyone paying market pricing for a few days?
We’re gonna just say poor people can’t possibly tolerate any change to their fuel situation whatsoever, and then suggest a large slice of them just don’t get gas at all, at any price? When the same situation barely causes any trouble for the rich? How on earth can you pretend that’s equitable?
Higher prices cause harm to 100% of poor people who drive. A “no price gouging” based shortage harms less than 100%, namely whatever percentage of the overall population is denied the opportunity to get gas by the shortage. Whatever slice that is, it’s the same slice as everyone else.
Let’s take that as the baseline, X% of everyone is unable to buy gas, let’s say it’s 25%. What is the incremental change under your plan?
- 75% of the poor (and non-poor) who were able to get gas, can still get gas, only it’s 3x the price
- 25% of the poor (and non-poor) who couldn’t get gas, can now get gas, at 3x the price.
- Some unknown % of the poor are going to voluntarily deny themselves gas and try to travel some other way.
The only poor people actually helped are the 25% who are no longer denied gas, less whatever fraction decide to do without, with the price of a far larger number of poor being harmed by the higher prices.
The non-poor make out very well, 25% of them get the market back, and none of them will be seriously put out by a temporary spike in the price.
One of the issues I have is that your post equivocates on the term “harm.” In my mind, having to borrow $125 or pay an extra $125 to get to work this week is certainly a harm. But it is a much greater harm to have no gas and make ZERO money that week at work and possibly get fired.
Also your posts assume that there are only two kinds of people in the world, the desperate working poor who are tapped out to the absolute max and have zero room for adjustments, and the filthy rich who can fill their jet skis with $12/gal gasoline. That misses the point that the economy looks at things in the aggregate and does not focus on the poorest employed person we can possibly imagine.
Looking in the aggregate and letting the market work would mean that the overwhelming majority of people would see: “Damn, $12 gas! I’m only using what I absolutely need right now” so that the people who need the gas have it available.
ETA: What if the poor person has a flat tire on the way to work this week and doesn’t have the money to fix it? It really does suck to be that poor, but you are asking to fix poverty at the expense of the free market and efficient allocation of resources.
Interesting thing about these concepts. They exist to serve us, to make our lives better. Sometimes they don’t do that. It happens. It’s not anybody’s fault, but these ideas have and will happily sentence millions of people to starve to death, live on the street, sleep while draped over a rope, force children to work in sweatshops, and adults to work themselves to death.
I value the free market up until the point when it starts harming people, it’s an immensely powerful force, for good and for ill.
There is nothing efficient about forcing a poor worker to take out a payday loan to buy gas. I also suspect that when that $125 loan winds up costing the worker $300, there will be plenty of folks reminding him that he’s poor because of his own bad choices.
Ultimately, absent rationing, we’re trading one bad outcome for another, and it’s no coincidence that the free market solution puts all the harm on the poor.
This just seems like more hand-waving to elide the concept of “higher gas prices are harm” into “I absolutely can’t work at all”, and deciding that the poor who can’t get gas ought to be cheered by the fact that some rich people are experiencing the same harm, which to them will be quite minor.
It puts me in mind of the quote by Anatole France:
Likewise do your price controls, in their majestic equality, forbid some slice of both the rich and poor from being physically present a full week at work. Given that the harm to the rich is negligible and the harm to the poor is catastrophic (as folks are insisting), this doesn’t sound all that majestic to me.
There seems to be an assumption that this is a zero-sum game here. That either the rich get all the expensive gas and the poor gets all the harm (via free market, when prices are allowed to rise), or that the poor & rich get equal harm alike (via government controlled price caps & rationing).
I think while its true that the free market solution places much more harm on the poor than rich, the overall “bucket” of harm is less.
The free market solution encourages efficient allocation of new shipments of fuel to the affected areas, incentivizes novel solutions to the problem, discourages lengthy queues (which can result in people having to take off work), and discourages hoarding/black market behavior.
Throwing governmental enforced controls over price and rationing may equalize the pain better, but the total pain is more. There’s less overall fuel in the area, less novel solutions to the problem (except for figuring out how to cheat the rationing system, or arbitrage the government controlled price on the black market), and more time wasted in lines (so that everyone can make sure they get their 5 gallons max per visit before supply runs out again, even if they don’t really need it right now).
Somewhat sarcastically amusing to see a republican governor critical of “world greed”.
Um, yes? If I had to pick which to eliminate, poverty or the efficient allocation of resources, I’d pick poverty every time.
Which isn’t to say I’m convinced one way or another about the issue in this thread, but the sequence of your priorities laid out here are … far from compelling.
Not to speak for UltraVires but I personally want to make clear that, for me, this isn’t about worship of free markets. Markets can be an amazing democratic tool that helps society understand how to regulate in the absence of complete information. They can also be a place to punt problems that we don’t really feel like solving. I argue that the decisions in Georgia were the worst kind of punt, a populist appeal by Kemp that resulted in the worst outcome for all concerned.
This issue isn’t that this is wrong, but that it’s right, theoretically, for every single governmental intrusion into the market. Whether it’s child labor, worker safety, WIC, unemployment insurance, slavery, human trafficking, or Social Security, the economy is made “less efficient” by the government requiring, banning or otherwise impacting any of these or thousands of other items.
Equalizing the pain, making sure the pain doesn’t fall entirely on those who can least weather the storm (and who always seem to be the most ‘efficient’ people to burden), this is a worthy goal, and justifies a modest decrease in overall efficiency to achieve.