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Comment by dimva | Hacker News Reader

As is often the case, the problem is millions of millionaires instead of a handful of billionaires.

There are 18.6 million millionaires in the US. If each of them bought 10 n95 masks just in case, or for themselves + family + friends, that's 186 million masks. They could easily pay $20 / mask (that's only $200 per millionaire), which would significantly push up the cost to hospitals of acquiring masks.

Hospitals might not even be able to afford the masks they need. They are having budget shortfalls due to the ban on elective surgery. Cuomo was complaining about paying $7/mask, and NY state is going to have budget shortfalls as well due to the recession.

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But then you're still expecting something implausible to happen, because everybody knows there is a shortage of masks and they're needed by healthcare workers, so the chances that 100% of millionaires will disregard that and buy masks they don't need is negligible.

I guess you disregard the nature of millionaires :-D

The majority of millionaires in the US are ordinary retirees who fully own their homes and have a decent amount in their 401k

I'm not sure what that has to do with them not buying masks

I agree with you and would add that it's not just millionaires. People on median incomes are buying masks at these inflated prices from profiteers, so the market is massively inflated.

Except that has never happened.

That is absolutely factually wrong. Mask prices on Amazon were already inflated back in February, and stocks were already very low.

But the most annoying thing about this thread is how it has turned into some kind of let's-forecast-the-markets game, instead of dealing with the underlying reality - that the markets failed to provide an essential good when it was needed, resulting in a significant number of avoidable deaths.

There should be a special word for the moral delusion that markets exist in an abstract philosophical vacuum and price signals are somehow more important than people's lives.

> Mask prices on Amazon were already inflated back in February, and stocks were already very low.

Please cite evidence that this was "millions of millionaires" buying masks.

When an oil refinery blows up and gas prices rise, that isn't evidence of millionaires hoarding, either. It's evidence of supply and demand at work.

You're talking about $200 per person. This isn't even "millions of millionaires" territory. This is "most of the middle class of a country of 300 million people".

> There should be a special word for the moral delusion that markets exist in an abstract philosophical vacuum and price signals are somehow more important than people's lives.

From my perspective, there should be some word for the delusion that equitable distribution of a smaller, price-fixed supply is better than prioritized distribution of a larger, price-gouging supply. The lack of masks that not allowing higher prices causes is going to kill people, and you want to restrict the supply available to everyone in order to not be unfair to the poor?

In an abstract philosophical vacuum, where manufacturers can instantaneously increase production of arbitrary goods to an arbitrary extent, such an argument makes sense.

In the real world, which recently has provided an ample sufficiency of evidence that manufacturers can do no such thing because the process depends on specialized machinery that takes considerable time to manufacture in its own right, such an argument can most kindly be described as struggling to achieve relevance.

Somewhat less kindly, one might note that such an argument equates to saying that, well, actually you can produce a baby in one month by getting nine women pregnant, as long as you pay all the women enough.

Manufacturers could have bought a lot of extra machinery knowing it's hardly ever needed, but they didn't. Why? During a crisis it's illegal to raise prices enough to fully pay off all that machinery.

The price is not limited right now, and yet production is barely ramping

Ooh, that's a good point. I think of it as related to free-market fundamentalism, but it deserves a word on its own.

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