{"id":505,"date":"2007-01-09T06:39:01","date_gmt":"2007-01-09T12:39:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.joewhite.com\/2007\/01\/09\/good-example-of-why-anti-gouging-laws-are-a-bad-idea\/"},"modified":"2007-01-09T06:39:07","modified_gmt":"2007-01-09T12:39:07","slug":"good-example-of-why-anti-gouging-laws-are-a-bad-idea","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.joewhite.com\/ramble\/2007\/01\/good-example-of-why-anti-gouging-laws-are-a-bad-idea\/","title":{"rendered":"Good example of why anti-gouging laws are a bad idea"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.econlib.org\/library\/Columns\/y2007\/Mungergouging.html\">Michael Munger, They Clapped,\u00a0Can Price-Gouging Laws Prohibit Scarcity: Library of Economics and Liberty<\/a>:<br \/>\n<br \/>\nWell, but what if you seek a political solution, rather than trusting markets?  What if you pass an anti-gouging law, to symbolize your opposition to scarcity?  Scarcity hurts; it means that I can&#8217;t have everything I want.  Let&#8217;s abolish scarcity; what then?   As I have tried to argue, all a state accomplishes by passing an anti-gouging law is to ensure that there is no ice.  I can&#8217;t get it for $100, or $1,000.  And too many citizens say, &#8220;Help: the market has failed!  Let&#8217;s call on government to rescue us!&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>But they are wrong.  Markets didn&#8217;t fail.  All that happened was that the price mechanism was bound and gagged, held hostage in the attic of the legislature.<br \/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Michael Munger, They Clapped,\u00a0Can Price-Gouging Laws Prohibit Scarcity: Library of Economics and Liberty: Well, but what if you seek a political solution, rather than trusting<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":647,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-505","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-thoughts"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pekNN-89","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.joewhite.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/505","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.joewhite.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.joewhite.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.joewhite.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/647"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.joewhite.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=505"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.joewhite.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/505\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.joewhite.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=505"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.joewhite.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=505"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.joewhite.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=505"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}