If people are willing to pay that much for gas, water, plane tickets, it means they really need it
Uhhhhh no. It means those people can afford it, nothing else. Your personal wealth has nothing to do with your need.
Uhhhhh no. It means those people can afford it, nothing else. Your personal wealth has nothing to do with your need.
If highly-demanded goods become expensive, that incentivises creative behaviour to supply more of those goods. That's a good thing.
If you're not allowed to charge fair market value, that won't make everything magically cheaper, it'll just mean there's not enough to go around.
Also parent is saying ability to pay doesn't correlate well to need. Many people need plane tickets or water who can't afford sky high prices.
Fixing supply only creates shortages, you can't repeal the laws of supply and demand.
Look up discrimination, you're abusing the word. For example why should those who are poor but live close to the store be discriminated against by price gouging? Under first-come-first serve there would be no shortage for them.
Also wealth is not a moral virtue and the wealthy don't deserve to survive disasters any more than the poor.
Continuing to run with this example -- if you are the owner of a pack of water that you typically sell for $10, and you decide to change the price you're offering it for sale to $100, no coercion (using the above definition) has taken place. Potential buyers are free to accept your offer of $100 for a pack of water, or they are free to reject it.
Certainly coercion is a deterrent to theft, but most people don't steal because they're socialized when they grow up to believe that stealing is wrong.
If coercion is the threat of physical force to get me to comply then property and contract law are just as coercive as tax law. In a disaster if everybody's price gouging water so it costs me $100 a case and I could steal it and get away with it you betcha I'm doing it. The only thing preventing me is the threat of physical force. That's coercion. So now the question is why is coercion okay to protect $100 water, but not okay to give out free water?
If I have a gun and say, "don't take my water or I shoot you" I have prevented you from acting thus not coercion.
If you have a gun and say, "give me your water or I shoot you" you have caused me to act thus coercion.
Markets are not coercive because you are not threatened with force if you don't participate. Taxes are coercive because if you don't pay, the government comes and takes your stuff or puts you in prison.
I understand you can make an argument that in a disaster situation you are "forced" to act but that is because of your own need not because of outside influence.
This is an alteration of the definition given. Up above, you can see that this exact situation falls under "threat of physical force in as a mean to get someone to comply with your wishes"
>Markets are not coercive because you are not threatened with force if you don't participate. Taxes are coercive because if you don't pay, the government comes and takes your stuff or puts you in prison.
But you are! Markets rely on property and contract law. Let me lay out the example. You are selling water for $100. I choose not to participate in the market and instead steal a case of water and take it home. Later the government comes and takes my stuff and puts me in prison.
So here we see that by the same token tax law is coercive, so are property and contract law. If property and contract law are coercive I don't see how you could ever say that markets aren't since they are the foundation of a market system.
You say "most people are raised to know that paying taxes is right. So taxes aren't coercive right?"
I agree that most people are raised to believe this, but I don't agree with it. Taxes ARE coercion. If taxation were voluntary, I believe the VAST majority of people would not pay them.
Using your example, using coercion to defend yourself or your property (a case of water in this example) is in fact coercion, but it's justified. Self-defense and defense of private property are the only times when I believe coercion is justified.
If you don't believe in private property, then we're just talking past each other.
Do you believe in private property?
We are talking past each other a bit so let's get back on track. The quoted above is what I'm getting at. What is the moral foundation for your belief that coercion is justified in cases of property. Why is coercion justified when defending your $100 case of water but not justified when the government taxes us?
Government taxation, by definition, is a violation of private property, it is not voluntary, people have no choice but to comply or be jailed.
If you don't believe in private property, but instead believe in a socialist or communist society where the means of production and private property are controlled by the government, then you will not share this belief.
The human right of free speech is simply the property right to hire an assembly hall from the owners, or to own one oneself
But property rights don't guarantee you an assembly hall, hired or owned. In fact property rights explicitly give the owners of an assembly hall the right to deny you. Okay, so you want to build one, well here too property rights give landowners the right to deny you access to any land. Timber and concrete companies can choose not to sell to you, the effect here is that, to you, property has simply granted the right to refusal, the right for others to refuse to allow you to speak. Without property rights, who can exclude you from the assembly hall? No one. In fact property rights here conflict with a right to free speech.
Also can I take this as confirmation that we are moving on from coercion? That you agree that coercion is not, in itself, bad?
The existence of the need shows a lack of empathy. There is no one alive who doesn't know that there will be emergencies and unexpected events. Their failure to prepare and subsequent expectation that they will have their needs met by tapping the resources of someone who did prepare is selfish and greedy.
I think the fact that you're claiming these flood victims (who do not all "expect" others to care for them, but may appreciate it) greedy shows a lack of empathy for their difficulty.
Let's say you have two similarly situated people. Right now everything is fine, as has been the case for years. One of these two people, however, feels that it can't always be good, so they spend some percentage of their income, time, and effort on ensuring they are prepared for some particular severity of disaster. There is an opportunity cost to this choice. They don't get to go to Disneyland with their kids one summer or they don't get to go to the bar every weekend or they skip buying a new phone. Whatever it is, there is definitely something they are giving up. Now the second person figures that the future emergency may never happen and they make a different calculus and instead spend their money and time by taking their kids to Disneyland or by going to the bar every weekend and stay up-to-date with their latest tech gadgets.
We could reasonably score these two people's lives and say that the first person has a quality of life score of 10 and the second person has a quality of life score of 15.
Eventually Irma or Jose or Katia shows up and rips up all the services, destroys the municipal water service and what not. Suddenly the second person has needs that they cannot meet on their own. The reason they can't meet these needs on their own is because of their decisions about how to allocate their resources. If at this point they say, "well I made my choice and went to disneyland and now i'm fucked, i'd appreciate help, but if you don't provide it i understand." Then that's a very respectable answer. On the other hand if they say "I need what you have, give it over or you're a rotten person." That's not a respectable answer. The expectation that one doesn't need to prepare for bad eventualities and instead just expect to be able to take from others is greedy and selfish.
I'm not pointing at specific individuals right now, but rather the general idea that those who don't prepare for their own future actually are being greedy and selfish. Arguments of the nature "I'm going to die if I don't get it" really aren't legitimate if the situation is even somewhat predictable and avoidable.
Maybe in a NORMAL F*CKING MARKET! Not a crisis. How long do you have to be creative when the water is rising in your living room? How quickly can you start an airline that charges reasonable rates when a hurricane is bearing down on your house? What is the economic incentive to rescue you neighbor from their roof during a flood?
Sorry for the yelling but jesus, you're suggesting "incentivizing" saving lives.
I think op makes a point that it isn't necessarily fair or good but that it is effective way to get more scarce goods to people.