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Comment by baggy_trough | Hacker News Reader

Why don't they raise the price until supply and demand balance?

It's not a supply/demand problem, they have enough fuel for everyone but due to a lorry driver shortage deliveries now take ~10 days whereas previously they were within 24h. The shortages are because demand over this type of timespan is unpredictable.

That would penalize the poor.

So would not being able to get fuel because there isn't enough of it because no one allowed supply and demand to work.

So you are suggesting that in order to help the poor buy fuel, we need to increase the price of fuel?

In order to help the people that need fuel the most the price of fuel should be increased. It's a basic self-healing mechanism.

But that's the problem of the market.

The fuel would not go to the people that need it the most, it will just go to the people that can afford to pay the most.

Market allocations happen not on need but on liquidity. In that aspect it's fundamentally inferior to that other mechanism that distributes according to need and from ability.

Since the “other mechanism” is that of the most murderous ideology of the past hundred years, I think we can rule it out.

If we must throw around such accusations to stop a meaningful discussion, here's mine: I think that there's a pretty good argument to be made that Capitalism is actually the most murderous ideology since.. ever? After all, it's estimated that the yearly death toll due to systemic poverty is about 18'000'000 per year[0][1].

Now, I'm not sure at what target your dismissive statement was aimed. Communism? Socialism? The phrase "From each according to their abilities to each according to their needs" is a phrase with long tradition, with some attributing the phrase to Morelly[2], so much earlier than the 'canonical' origins of socialism or communism. And the idea goes back much further than that.

But I'm not actually of the opinion that ideologies cause or solve problems. People cause or solve problems. Ideologies simply give people the justification for their actions. Most of the time people just do their stuff and find an excuse later.

Instead we should try to find ways to apply certain ideologies where they make sense. Want to develop an emerging market? Sounds like a job for some capitalism. Need to maintain a shared infrastructure? Pretty sure that socialism will create better results.

What we can see is that especially with indispensable goods and services, capitalism does bad job as soon as it comes to shortages.

[0] http://jpr.sagepub.com/content/13/4/343.refs

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Violence-Reflections-Our-Deadliest-Epi...

Not quite true. Although very wealthy people could afford to pay a high price for fuel for frivolous reasons, most people (even the wealthy) would tend to avoid doing so. So if a middle-class person were planning on using fuel to go on a road trip, they might postpone or cancel the event, which would help to ease the demand. Whereas if a relatively poor person were planning on using the fuel to go on a road trip - to attend the funeral of a loved-one - they might decide it's worth any cost and go anyway. Hence the people that need the fuel the most are able to use it, whereas the people who merely would like it are not. This extends to far more important operations: If an organ-delivery service needs the fuel to get a living heart from a donor to someone whose life depends on it, they're able to pay the added cost. In a system where prices are fixed too low to quell demand the heart patient will pass away due to lack of availability of fuel. It's literally a matter of life-or-death that prices be able to rise to quell demand.

> In a system where prices are fixed too low to quell demand

Yeah, that would be a pretty stupid system, I wholeheartedly agree. In situations where there's not enough supply to a indispensable good, rationing seems the only logical approach.

The poor might prefer to be able to buy half their usual amount rather than none at all.

If that is such a problem for poor, and we want to base our policies on what affects poor, maybe just give them more money?

> So would not being able to get fuel because there isn't enough of it because no one allowed supply and demand to work.

The UK has strict rules on how much petrol/gas anyone can carry. Consequently this type of law works as an automatic rationing.

https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/uk-news/law-rul...

So yes, "allowing supply and demand to work" is a stupid idea that patently does not work at all, as exemplified by the ridiculous toilet paper shortage of 2020.

If they don’t raise the price, then yes, it will not work. Not sure why anyone would expect differently.

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