The whole price gouging conversation is societal bike shedding. Modern governments can and do provide emergency aid almost in real time as disasters happen.
About price gouging, I’m not sure this is even the right question. Disaster recovery is the perfect situation where planned economy beats market: there’s a known need, affecting a known set of people equally, and the government has tax money specifically for this need.
And yeah, I also wish the “bikeshed” of price limits stopped being discussed, made into law, etc.
Giving people extra money so they could afford toilet paper would not have helped. The problem wasn’t that people couldn’t afford toilet paper, but that there wasn’t any available, and it was the panic buying and speculation that resulted in it not being available.
And the problem also wasn’t that the manufacturers had no incentive to make more toilet paper, so giving people more money to buy toilet paper wouldn’t have helped there either.
When I said the government should use tax money to finance disaster recovery, I didn’t mean it should give that money to individual people to buy disaster supplies.
A few weeks ago I said the same thing:
And yeah, I also wish the “bikeshed” of price limits stopped being discussed, made into law, etc.
Giving people extra money so they could afford toilet paper would not have helped. The problem wasn’t that people couldn’t afford toilet paper, but that there wasn’t any available, and it was the panic buying and speculation that resulted in it not being available.
And the problem also wasn’t that the manufacturers had no incentive to make more toilet paper, so giving people more money to buy toilet paper wouldn’t have helped there either.
When I said the government should use tax money to finance disaster recovery, I didn’t mean it should give that money to individual people to buy disaster supplies.