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| Why We Don't Take Comedy Seriously | Hillary Clinton "On Her Own" |
What is "Price Gouging?"
by Christopher Chantrill
May 31, 2007 at 5:00 am
YOU’D EXPECT economist Thomas Sowell to be annoyed by the concept of “price gouging.” And he is. Just what exactly is “price gouging,” anyway, he asks?
The phrase is used when prices are higher than most people are used to. But there is nothing special or magic about what we happen to be used to.
When the conditions that determined the old prices change, the new prices are likely to be very different. That is not rocket science.
OK. Quite right, Dr. Sowell. So they complain to their congressman.
But let us indulge in a little amateur psychology here. People don’t like unexpected increases in prices. They don’t like them because at some point they are going to have to change their behavior and do something about the increased prices. They experience a “felt uneasiness,” in the words of Ludwig von Mises, and feel called upon to act. They could act by reducing their consumption, either of the newly expensive product or something else. Or they could act by writing to their congressman, or bitching at the office about “price gouging.”
Acting to change your consumption patterns is hard. Acting by writing to your congressman is easy.
Congressmen know that it is no good arguing with an irate constituent. The best thing is to do some arm-waving and pretend to do something by introducing legislation. Hopefully, by the time you have finished your arm-waving the constituent will have got over his anger.
What is “price gouging?” It is a price increase large enough that doing nothing may not be enough. And we don’t like it one bit.
Sphere: Related Content | | printChristopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.
Racial Discrimination
[T]he way “to achieve a system of determining admission to the public schools on a nonracial basis,”
Brown II, 349 U. S., at 300–301, is to stop assigning students on a racial basis. The way to stop
discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.
Roberts, C.J., Parents Involved in Community Schools vs. Seattle School District
Churches
[In the] higher Christian churches… they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm
Sacrifice
[Every] sacrifice is an act of impurity that pays for a prior act of greater impurity... without its participants having to suffer the full consequences incurred by its predecessor. The punishment is commuted in a process that strangely combines and finesses the deep contradiction between justice and mercy.
Frederick Turner, Beauty: The Value of Values
Pentecostalism
Within Pentecostalism the injurious hierarchies of the wider world are abrogated and replaced by a single hierarchy of faith, grace, and the empowerments of the spirit... where groups gather on rafts to take them through the turbulence of the great journey from extensive rural networks to the mega-city and the nuclear family...
David Martin, On Secularization
Conservatism's Holy Grail
What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph
Moral Imperatives of Modern Culture
These emerge out of long-standing moral notions of freedom, benevolence, and the affirmation of ordinary life... I have been sketching a schematic map... [of] the moral sources [of these notions]... the original theistic grounding for these standards... a naturalism of disengaged reason, which in our day takes scientistic forms, and a third family of views which finds its sources in Romantic expressivism, or in one of the modernist successor visions.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self
Drang nach Osten
There was nothing new about the Frankish drive to the east... [let] us recall that the continuance of their rule depended upon regular, successful, predatory warfare.
Richard Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversion
Government Expenditure
The Union publishes an exact return of the amount of its taxes; I can get copies of the budgets of the four and twenty component states; but who can tell me what the citizens spend in the administration of county and township?
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America
Living Law
The recognition and integration of extralegal property rights [in the Homestead Act] was a key element in the United States becoming the most important market economy and producer of capital in the world.
Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital
German Philosophy
The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since
1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and
philosophical conception of man and nature... has been shown by indisputable evidence to be
inadequate.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Meeting of East and West
Action
The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness...
But to make a man act [he must have]
the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove
or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action
Holy Families
Revelations cannot be sustained and transformed into successful new religions by lonely prophets... Indeed, new religious movements based on revelations typically are family affairs.
Rodney Stark, Exploring the Religious Life
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