Have you ever considered that you have terminal America Brain and that your particular economic theories haven't exactly proven robust or even helpful for the past century?
I certainly don't since America has bailed out companies many times in the past and is considering bailing them again this time.
Now people investing in french companies will pay unfairly high prices for their shares.
Switching to nationalization, it’s pretty clear that that removes the incentive to take on risk and found a company since you are always at risk of the government stealing your assets.
Sorry I didn’t include citations but I would really encourage you to read about rational pricing and healthy market dynamics. Those that think you can just artificially decide the price of a security rather than let the price discovery mechanism play out are doomed to repeat the same problem we see in communist countries: you can buy bread for a “fair” price, but there’s no bread to buy because the price was too low.
1. shortages
2. gluts
3. black markets
In other words, we already have “soft” price-fixing.
Countering misinformation is good, but please don’t call it misinformation if you don’t understand what the text you link says.
Prices need to be able to increase beyond just any cost increases from the TP manufacturer. Without freedom to set prices as desired, we will continue to have shortages.
Higher profits from gouging is what motivates people to increase the supply. Altruism only goes so far. Profit motive to provide needed supplies is far more effective.
Remove the profit motive, relying on the government and altruism, is a very poor substitute.
Hoarding resources that we aren't globally in short of, actually makes the situation far worse. The demand spike is solely caused by hoarders and price gougers, to the detriment of everybody else.
Anti-gouging laws mean that you'll either do without or pay even higher prices for black market goods. The more you punish black marketeers, the higher go the prices you'll have to pay.
There are when a bunch of people buy up the entire supply, and try to resell it at 5x the rate.
> Gouging disincentivizes hoarding.
Only after the gougers have hoarded everything they can.
The gougers in this case aren't making any more toilet paper appear in the world. The factories aren't making more of it, just because a few people bought it out, because the global demand for it is constant. They simply created an artificial shortage, and introduced themselves as a parasitic middleman.
Things don't happen in a vacuum. If the gougers create an artificial shortage, then there is money to be made by increasing the supply. In fact, there'll be plenty of money to be made selling to the would-be gougers. The supply is not fixed and gouging will increase the supply.
1. The absolute supply of toilet paper on a long-term timescale will not increase.
2. The cost of increasing manufacturing capacity may not be worth the increased revenues from selling into a two-week shortage.
3. There's a lag time. By the time you increasing manufacturing capacity, and get paper into groceries, the demand curve would have flattened out.
4. There isn't an actual shortage, there are some very localized shortages, which will get smoothed out once supplies sitting in warehouses get to store shelves. Nobody in Mexico increases toilet paper manufacturing capacity because the corner store across my apartment is out. Nobody working in grocery logistics is going to be calling people in to work overtime to deal with this, either.
* 100 rolls of toilet paper sold to whoever comes first
* 100 rolls of toiler paper sold to whoever bids highest
The point is, gouging creates MORE availability. Remember those hurricanes? People outside the devastated zones promptly filled jerry cans with gas, drove into the disaster area, and sold gas out of the back of their pickup trucks for high prices.
That is, until the government made it illegal to do that. The next disaster meant people had no gas until the government got around (days later) to bringing some in and rationing it.
TP is not quite the inelastic situation you posit it is. For example, there's been a boom in sales of bidet toilet attachments. High prices for tp make it very attractive to switch, thus making tp available for others. High prices mean people who already have more tp than they need will be tempted to sell it. High prices mean TP makers will ramp up production as fast as possible. High prices mean people will be motivated to make & sell TP alternatives. High prices mean people have no reason to hoard TP.
Anti-gouge laws lead directly to hoarding and no TP available.
What country do you live in?
Tell me why this is stupid.
edit: wouldn’t let me reply, I know they regulate existing product prices and that new products need to be filed and that states have different laws regarding coverage limits and litigation details
Just look at California's water shortage issues. Water prices are basically fixed so huge farms suck up all the water to irrigate a desert while ordinary people are told to stop bathing. Seems like an externality of price regulation, no?
Could you give some evidence or argument or both to explain why you think __blockcypher__ is wrong?
> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
In what way am I seriously oversimplifying reality?
That is why I think you oversimplified. This is not a communist takeover of France.
Note: I did not, and wouldn't have downvoted you for your comment. Yours is a fair opinion to have.
I think pg was wrong to endorse "down-vote for disagreement"; downvotes should be for poorly made arguments, ad hominems, memes [on this site] and other low value comments.
My ideal is something akin to what slashdot has, multi-axis voting that allows users to select to their preferences.
I'm ashamed on behalf of HN that your comment hasn't been flagged or downvoted into oblivion on that characteristic alone.
Actually I'm accusing them of having their brains poisoned by American free market dogma.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B073TJBYTB/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?...
https://www.amazon.com/Factfulness-Reasons-World-Things-Bett...
https://newint.org/sites/default/files/u354/LongreadFig2%2C3...
It's worth noting that the Our World in Data plot is misleading in the pre-1980 part. What it is actually showing is neither poverty, but some relationship of GDP to poverty, nor the population of the world, instead it is almost entirely the Western world.
The World Bank, UN and the IMF use extreme poverty as a measure and define it as having the purchasing power of $1.90 (in the US in 2011 for the OWiD plot) a day. But that's very low and pretty arbitrary. €6.70 a day is needed for decent nutrition, $7.40 for typical life expectancy, $8 a day to reduce infant mortality rate. The US poverty line in 2015 was $30 a day.
Pinkner has a lot to say about the reduction in violence that I agree we should be optimistic about. And there's much to be said about improvements in technology, access to education (especially for girls), increases in vaccination globally. But that OWiD plot is used to jump on the New Optimism bandwagon to say a lot more than anything you should conclude from a such an arbitrary set of data.
Think of all the people in conflict areas who could live a decent life were they allowed to simply be in peace. Think of all the people who have lived good lives and then been displaced by horrific natural disasters. Its not an issue of economics. Its just a fact of reality.