[driftdiver]

make price gouging legal, sure, as long as you make beating merchants who price gouge legal as well

[DonkeyBonker]

Only good I can see in it is you know who to avoid spending money at in the future. Payback is a b*tch.

[Tublecane]

“Gouging” is good because market prices are good. They tell us best how to ration scarce resources. If you don’t like them, change supply or demand. Rail against nature or God. But don’t penalize sellers, who are only telling us the way things are. And don’t control prices, which can only redistribute relative benefit and hurt.

[stuartcr]

How would anyone know how much they would need before this storm? In the south coast, where storms are common, people get to do this every year just about, so they would have some kind of an idea. This has never happened up there. If you went to the store on friday, how much water do you think you would need for this storm? If you used public transportation and lived on the 11th floor, how much water would you have bought?

[discostu]

So you’re saying having people not being able to buy water because the price has been increased is better than having people not being able to buy water because the store sold it all? Yeah, no good. Price gouging is the most distasteful form of profiting from a captive audience, because this audience is captive due to disaster, it’s punishing people for living in the wrong city in the wrong week.

[Da Bilge Troll]

This is one of those things some people simply cannot be convinced of, like the damage caused by minimum wage laws. The only result of anti-gouging laws are empty tanks.

[jeffc]

I guess this just lets the price-gouging merchants off the hook for not having a conscience and caring about their neighbors.

[Bloody Sam Roberts]

Now consider the unseen: the customers at the back of the line who aren't able to purchase any bottled water because it's all gone.

Price gouging is a non-issue for anyone with a brain. Front or back of the line for water the day before the storm...they are all to stupid to live. Why wouldn't these folks get their shiite together a WEEK before the storm? Why not a month? Why not a year?

I was unaffected by this storm. It made a nifty hairpin turn around Massachusetts. Yet even if it had not veered, I was not concerned. Generator? Check. 80 gallons of stabilized gasoline? Check. Huge number of gallons of fresh water? Check. Food, alternate lighting, alternate cooking solutions to last years? Check. G & A to protect it all? Check.

And people call Preppers crazy? Screw 'em.

Cold hearted and cynical? Check.

[mjp]

But the problems with anti-"gouging" laws aren't just philosophical; they also hurt the very disaster victims they're supposed to protect.

In a free society, with a free market,the price of good in limited supply in a free market always tends to be set high enough to level down the quantity of the good demanded - that is, the quantity of it that buyers are seeking to buy - to equality with the limited supply of it that exists.

[fabian]

This article is one big excuse for greed. Bunch of bs.

[ansel12]

I saw repairs gouging in Houston.

I was there when Houston had a freakish freeze of 5 degrees, and it froze the non-insulated copper water pipes all over the city, plumbers made many millions gouging the customers, but the state made the companies refund millions.

I was a plumber and have never seen anything like it, it was straight out theft, the companies had to deal with rebelling plumbers.