Which is great. I don’t have a problem with that, even right before a disaster. It’s the argument others are putting forth that jacking the price way up acts as a limiter that I’m pointing out as false. Folks who come in to buy all the water they can carry will so long as they can afford it, jacking up the price just changes who buys all the water they can carry from the people there first to the people there with fatter wallets, in the end there will still be a bunch of people who don’t get any. If an owner wants to spread their stock among more people the limit is the way to do it, they don’t take advantage of people in a bad situation AND they accomplish what the gouging defenders say gouging will do but it actually doesn’t.
“hacking up the price just changes who buys all the water they can carry from the people there first to the people there with the fatter wallets”
That is unmitigated BS. I knew someone would dig up this stale, old argument. It doesn’t happen that way for the same reason rich people don’t outbid us the rest of the time: there are more of us. There’re only so many rich people, and they can buy only so much. With fatter wallets I’d imagine them having more options and less need to stock up, but anyway our only guard against ones who are ignoring common sense and setting their hearts on buying as much as pleases them is to raise the price. Whatever else is there to disuade them?
Higher prices impose thrift, even on fat wallets. Numbers outbid deep pockets, as you’d know if you’ve paid attention in times of extreme scarcity instead of to your wild theories about what happens.
I don’t know why it is about money.
In post 29 I was showing that limiting the number of items purchased is common, routine, everyday, so gouging is not the only way to limit purchases by an individual(s).