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Comment by YeGoblynQueenne | Hacker News Reader

In times of war it becomes very difficult to find basic goods such as food items, or hygiene supplies. Some people will get out of their way to collect such goods and make them available to the general population. Clearly, those goods must be sold at a very high markup, to cover not only the expense of buying them but also the personal risk of the merchant to procure and sell them.

Clearly it's more beneficial for the community to have basic goods available, at a high price, than to not have any!

And yet, such enterprise that is clearly beneficial to the community is stigmatised as "black market".

Discuss?

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One reason, is that the lack of necessities in times of crisis is often due to hoarding. And these people selling at inflated prices are, perhaps, the worst hoarders.

Second, they may have goods that can mean the difference between life and death. And they choose to use that situation for turning a huge profit. There isn't really anything commendable in that.

> One reason, is that the lack of necessities in times of crisis is often due to hoarding.

Is “hoarding” just a synonym for “owning”?

> Second, they may have goods that can mean the difference between life and death. And they choose to use that situation for turning a huge profit. There isn't really anything commendable in that.

Sounds like, “Do what zosima says with your stuff, otherwise you’re BAD!”

> Is “hoarding” just a synonym for “owning”?

hoarding is owning way more than you need to the detriment of other people.

> Sounds like, “Do what zosima says with your stuff, otherwise you’re BAD!”

Generally using life-or-death situations to run a huge profit is at best considered impolite. Zosima is not alone in thinking so.

> hoarding is owning way more than you need to the detriment of other people.

So hoarding is owning plus the opinion of a Good Person such as Doxina that the owning is BAD because of its size. What if another Good Person thinks the owning is not excessive, then is it both hoarding and not hoarding? Maybe Schrodinger knows.

> Generally using life-or-death situations to run a huge profit is at best considered impolite. Zosima is not alone in thinking so.

“Do what Zosima and Doxin and the other Good People say with your stuff, otherwise you’re BAD!”

I think the disagreement about whether black markets are real and "price gouging" is a helpful way to frame what happens boils down to ordinary folks (excusably) rounding off high supply and demand inelasticity to 100% and folks that believe they have a more nuanced view (you and I) saying well it's not quite 100%.

If the demand and supply elasticities are really totally inelastic there's nothing to be gained from allowing market activity. No new supplies will become available due to a high price and no one will cut back on their consumption either. You'll just be allowing folks to get rinsed financially at their lowest point which of course sucks.

If either elasticity isn't perfectly inelastic then there's scope for increased efficiency through market activity, at the cost of some or lots of folks getting rinsed financially. That's the tradeoff and usually I'm for allowing the rinsing and making up the inequity on the backend in order to squeeze every last bit of efficiency out in an emergency. But I'm not die-hard committed to the idea and recognize the tradeoff.

The last point to mention is budget constraints. If Bill Gates is around and has 1000x more money than I have he really can inefficiently hoard resources even if he's not perfectly inelastic in his demand. This is a trickier situation to justify black markets but I think it's so vivid and awful that folks' minds jump right to this situation when not all emergencies are like this.

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