This guy did something that at a minimum will make him a pariah in his community and at worst could get him convicted of crimes in several states, yet he didn’t hesitate to have his name, picture, and complete confession plastered nationwide in one of the country’s premier and most widely read newspapers. Head-scratcher.
Anti-gouging laws are seldom enforced and are of dubious constitutional basis. I'm entirely for them, but I doubt this guy is going to be convicted of anything.
We had a similar case in Canada where a Vancouver couple talked to a newspaper about their enterprise and it just left me pondering what they thought the outcome would be. People respecting their "hustle" and business savvy?
Wage theft is also seldom enforced. That doesn't make wage theft right. That is, I don't see what that has to do with anything.
Anti-gouging laws are applied (it seems) after every major hurricane. I hear the news talk about how to report gouging incidents, for example.
Prosecutions occur often enough that I'm surprised to hear you say they don't have a constitutional basis. Surely that would have been tested by now (and from what I can tell, it has, and not found to be unconstitutional).
Yes, there are limits on what the state can do with regards to interstate trade. But most anti-gouging laws are state laws, and not really subject to direct US Federal Constitution limits.
So, could you explain more about how they are dubious?
I responded to someone who claimed that what he is doing "could get him convicted of crimes in several states". While he could potentially face sanction, he isn't going to be convicted of anything.
"But most anti-gouging laws are state laws, and not really subject to direct US Federal Constitution limits."
Are you seriously arguing that state laws aren't subject to the constitution? What a wild discussion.
The number of actual convictions from these laws are absolutely minuscule, targeted only at major players, and a number of them fell on a constitutional challenge.
"Prosecutions occur often enough"
No, no they don't. You could count them on one hand. Don't confuse the big show about such laws with actual enforcement of them -- most such laws aren't even written to be enforceable (South Carolina, for instance, bans "unconscionable" pricing, which is legally meaningless). They are a showy discouragement and public placation.
Let me go back to your first paragraph-
"That doesn't make wage theft right." [arguing by association that I'm somehow saying that price gouging is right]
Apologies for the (necessary) wording, but fuck that disingenuous, obnoxious strawman. Nowhere did I say it was right. It is heinous. It is socially reprehensible. It is obnoxious behavior, and hopefully as supplies equalize this asshole and everyone like him are caught with a garage full of these things. But if people depend upon the law to discourage people this they're going to be disappointed.
However, the anti-gouging laws discussed here are not interstate commerce. So, what is non-constitutional argument you refer to?
"You could count [prosecutions] on one hand."
Really? What is the basis for your statement?
DDG quickly helped me find the following 6 links, including one mentioning 15 lawsuits in Florida and another how '78 gas stations and other businesses gouged customers' in Georgia and had to pay fines.
2. "The Sonoma County District Attorney's Office has filed three misdemeanor price gouging complaints against six landlords who allegedly raised home rental prices more than 10 percent after a declaration of emergency during the North Bay wildfires in October." - https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/six-santa-rosa-landlor...
4. "So far, the Governor’s Office of Consumer Affairs has probed 197 of those complaints and determined that 78 gas stations and other businesses gouged customers. Those businesses agreed to pay Georgia tens of thousands of dollars in fines and offer refunds to victims for overcharges." - https://www.ajc.com/news/local/refunds-promised-for-gas-goug...
6. "Since Attorney General Charlie Crist took office in 2002, the state has launched 72 formal investigations of alleged gouging and filed 15 lawsuits. “In 2004 and 2005, with each successive storm we saw fewer and fewer complaints about price gouging,” said Crist spokeswoman JoAnn Carrin. The law, she said, is having a deterrent effect." - http://www.nbcnews.com/id/12498071...
"My question, restated, is what part of the US constitution do you think prohibits anti-gouging laws?"
You specifically claimed that these were state laws and thus were not subject to federal constitutional limits, which is absurdly wrong. Why you would even inject that, and then strangely start spinning in a different direction, is left for one to wonder.
Then again, you also grotesquely misrepresented my post, so I understand your comment has zero sincerity and instead you're just stomping your feet and saying "gouging bad!" despite agreement by all parties.
As to your "I did a Google search" --
Again, convictions. John Shepperson was not convicted. No one is EVER convicted. Anyone who contests the fines see them dissolved. It's a feel good for stupid people.
This appears to still be a disagreement on details where you are not reading what I wrote. All I want to know is why anti-gouging laws are "of dubious constitutional basis."
You write that I wrote "and thus were not subject to federal constitutional limits"
I was more nuanced. I said "not really subject to direct US Federal Constitution limits".
There is no direct Federal Constitution limit on anti-gouging laws. (By comparison, see the direct prohibition on slavery (except as punishment for a criminal conviction)).
Therefore, if something isn't constitutional it must derive from some other principle, like the commerce clause, or perhaps interpretation.
Which is it?
Now, I am a programmer, with no legal training or political science training past high school classes. It's entirely possible that I have the terminology wrong. But I don't see how it's so wrong as to rate your response.
You constructed a quote from me: "I did a Google search"
As I wrote, I used DuckDuckGo. I realize "Google search" has taken on the generic meaning of "web search", but point it out as part of what seems to be your pattern of re-interpreting what I wrote in a way which I thought I was clear to not say.
"Again, convictions"
I think you have misread the thread.
The OP wrote "This guy did something that at a minimum will make him a pariah in his community and at worst could get him convicted of crimes in several states"
You rejected "convicted".
Sure. I'm fine with that. Because that wasn't my point. I wrote "Prosecutions occur often enough that I'm surprised to hear you say they don't have a constitutional basis." I even showed how one anti-gouging law was found invalid because of its conflict with the commerce clause. But that finding was specific to the details of that law.
You then followed up with "No, no they don't. You could count them on one hand." The "they" in this case was "prosectutions", because your text directly quoted what I wrote on prosecutions. It was not about convictions.
So no, I did not bring up John Shepperson as an example of being jailed. I brought him up as an example of being prosecuted. Which was exactly the issue you said happened fewer than 6 times.
You write "Anyone who contests the fines see them dissolved".
I did point out that "78 gas stations and other businesses" in GA were fined. I suppose you'll say they weren't contested and dissolved because it was cheaper to pay the fine than to contest.
But honestly, I don't care. I want to know how anti-gouging laws are "of dubious constitutional basis", not how they are of dubious effectiveness.
Compress your responses. A giant wall is not conducive of anything.
Unconstitutional because there is no such thing as a "fair" cost for things, and when the state intrudes on commerce in a capricious, arbitrary manner it is unconstitutional, as has been shown countless times in countless cases.
This isn't difficult. Though again you accuse me of misreading the thread. LOL.
What part of the constitution are you referencing? Which court cases? I've looked for a couple of hours, but failed to find anything.
Without something concrete, I will conclude your original statement about dubiousness is unsupported.
Why are all anti-gouging laws necessarily capricious and arbitrary? Certainly some may be, but some are no less capricious and arbitrary than saying that 21 is the legal drinking age or that the speed limit on a given highway is 65 mph.
We (the guy in the article and myself) live in a nation where insurance companies would rather see you die than pay out, insulin is $350/bottle when it's $7 to produce, and politicians that we elect are entirely for it all. We have ourselves to blame for setting the moral standard.
Probably that if someone wants to make cheap lifesaving medicine they should have an easy way to do that instead of a Kafkaesque hellscape to navigate, but I'm not sure that insight generalizes beyond "make good things easy".
I am genuinely curious about your position on this because it baffles me. This may be censored by the thought police here since it’s the truth no one wants to face, but what would one expect when a system that has to compensate for MASSIVE costs and losses from being required to take care of tens of millions of foreign nationals who have paid essentially nothing into the system built up and paid into over many decades and generations? I would expect such a system to produce $300 insulin that costs $7 (regardless of whether those numbers are accurate) To me, it makes perfectly rational and logical sense that it would be the inevitable consequence that $7 insulin would cost $300, because that is consequences of reality … also known as basic accounting.
It’s no different than if, e.g., you have a store in some corrupt cartel controlled territory where they extorted your for protection money, which makes you have to increase your prices in order to recover that cost from everyone else’s. No different in terms of accounting, even if you try to absorb some of the costs to not make others suffer as much and you and your family take on even more individual suffering for it. These are all logical and predictable things, seeing the future level predictable, they’re so basic.
You clearly seem to think that it’s somehow not the logical consequence of the system as it is. Why is that? What we are actually facing and what Europe will unfortunately for them soon enough face, is a shift from a kind of preemptive system to a reactionary system, the consequences and costs of immediate gratification drawing down on the reserves built up through delayed gratification and forward thinking; the fable of the grasshopper and the ants. Insulin can only be $7 when all other costs of the system are covered; they are not, so insulin costs $300 instead to make up for the massive losses elsewhere taking care of tens of millions of foreign nationals in the USA who have never paid into the system that is being destroyed by their drawing down the reserves and capacity.
It’s all very clear and logical, and inevitable, regardless of the fact that I don’t like it either. We seem to have a far bigger problem with misunderstanding of the facts and reality though. You want $7 insulin?figure out how to make all the foreign nationals pay up for the system built and paid into over many decades and generations, or at least for the full cost of the services they consume. That is the only way you get $7 insulin, or even cheaper insulin.
i honestly don't get what people you are talking about... who did not pay into what system and why does that drive prices for insulin up? I mean i get that 7$ production cost does not translate into a 7$ price tag even without a profit but what is driving the cost of these people that has to be compensated for in insulin pricing?
This is stupid on two levels. The first is that obviously this guy is a crook, profiteering from a crisis.
The second is that hand sanitizer isn't even necessary, soap and water is better, and people paying $7 for a bottle of hand sanitizer are ignorant when they could just buy a bar of soap.
Hand sanitizer is really useful in office's and when you're out and about at the moment though.
You basically can't get out of an office bathroom without realistically touching several surfaces of questionable cleanliness for a contagious pathogen, for example.
"Takes 4 minutes of hand sanitizer to remove viruses."
No it doesn't. The study you refer to was one specific virus (influenza-A) that simulated essentially coughing directly onto your hands. Where the virus was encased in large volume of mucus.
That isn't how people use sanitizer. It's for dry contact displacement, and there it is incredibly effective. You should still wash your hands when you can, of course, but these misleading claims aren't helping anything.
Most sources [1] say that alcohol-based hand sanitizer can deactivate targetable viruses within 30s. The CDC recommendations for coronavirus are to apply a suitable amount and take at least 20s to spread it over your hands completely.
Coronavirus's are a class of viruses well known to be susceptible to deactivation by alcohol exposure [2].
The virus can not pass through skin. Wear a mask, even a cheap fabric one if nothing else is available, to prevent yourself touching your face. Then wash your hands when you get to a bathroom.
How about when you get off the subway and need to grab a quick lunch at small establishment that doesn't have bathrooms?
In NYC, many lunch places have only maybe 4-10 seats at a window or something. The law says they don't need to provide a bathroom, and they usually don't (no space).
Or even if you go to McDonald's or something, there's often a line of like 5 people each taking 10 minutes inside the single bathroom. (Welcome to New York.)
Hand sanitizer is literally the only way many times not to get the virus from your hands into your mouth when eating.
He claims his actions would put him in a really good place financially, and later claims he isn't making much profit. That's some impressive cognitive dissonance.
“But I’m not looking to be in a situation where I make the front page of the news for being that guy who hoarded 20,000 bottles of sanitizer that I’m selling for 20 times what they cost me.”
This guy is a complete piece of shit. What kind of monster do you have to be to deny everyone that lives anywhere close to you reasonable access to critical supplies? I hope a mob descends on his house.
Price gouging (The practice of raising prices on certain types of goods and services to an unfair level, especially during a state of emergency) can be crime during civil emergencies.
If you don't have laws and rules based society, you might be killed for doing that. 100 year ago this guy could easily get a beating or tarring and feathering type punishment.
It's amazing that some person can do that and don't think that they might be doing something really wrong, at least ethically. He want's publicity for his stunt.
I may be mistaken but I think the state of emergency declarations actually made price gouging universally illegal, which he probably should have expected even if eBay, Amazon and that AG hadn't acted on their own.
In Lithuania, Gov allowed for some Alcoholic drink factories to make Sanitizer. One factory doing 30 tons a day of Sanitizer and starting shipping it asap. Others are smaller, but about 14 factories doing it full time. Within week, the market will be full.
Of course, but this kind of behavior in terms of utilizing private enterprises for public good like how you describe is pretty much anathema in US and hasn’t been done since WWII. It’s a fantastic idea, but not something the US public seems able to readily accept.
If you could sell it in a way that convinced the CEO’s of these companies that they would get even richer over it, however, it would happen tomorrow.
People have loss all sense of hustle. As far as exposure, there are FaceBook and Google ads.
You can do credit cards through PayPal or even use the Web Payments API that let you do secure payments on the web via a company like Stripe and that will work with Apple and Google Pay.
It's not really about sense of hustle. The problem is on the demand side, not the supply side. The vast majority of people would not trust a fly-by-night website selling hand sanitisers at elevated price.
Resolving an issue is only helpful if you know that you have a fake good. For instance it was widely reported that companies were selling defective helmets and that people didn’t know until after their loved ones were in a fatal accident.
If you do know the goods are fake and you pay with a credit card, you dispute it with your credit card company.
Okay, so how is this a problem that exists with Amazon and not the hypothetical website that this man should have set up? We're starting to go off on a bit of a tangent here.
The lesson is that if your idea of a successful business plan is depending on competing on a commodity platform without any differentiator, it’s more than likely to fail.
That’s not only about Amazon and Ebay, but also depending on SEO on Google, the app stores, etc.
Those 17,700 bottles of hand sanitizer were better off staying in their respective stores and being sold off in their surrounding communities. Unless the gov steps in, I don't see needed supplies like this, masks, medicines, etc, being distributed fairly to everyone in the market. Rather profiteers will get their access and sell off to hoarders. The comfort of having access to some of these supplies, even if they are not effective, goes a long way.
> being distributed fairly to everyone in the market
Of course. Courts and parents are supposed to be fair, the market isn't. Market dynamics are useless in the face of a pandemic - the virus is not a market participant and has no conception of property rights.
On a sinking ship, bailing water out out of only your cabin is a pretty stupid plan.
“ Current price-gouging laws “are not built for today’s day and age,” Mr. Colvin said. “They’re built for Billy Bob’s gas station doubling the amount he charges for gas during a hurricane.””
Do you happen to know why these laws apply to a few named categories (not including what he wants to sell) rather than everything, and why they apply only when the relevant states declare an emergency?
I don't mean why you think they should do so, or might, but do you know the actual reasoning applied by the legislatures at the time of enactment?
I don’t mind people selling stuff at high prices if it is in demand. I do mind front-running the population by buying uhaul-sized piles of supplies. I blame the stores he bought from - they should have refused to sell obviously in-demand items to one person in that quantity.
Many stores will put in place per customer limits for critical (or likely to sell out) items. It's not unreasonable to say 2 bottles of sanitizer max per customer...
Ok, I should have said they have only low-efficiency, purely reactive high-latency mechanisms to prevent people from buying things.
A store needs to experience a run on merchandise and also (through some other information channel) come to understand that this is actually a bad enough thing to override their normal business imperatives to sell the stuff they have.
Blaming stores for sales they make today makes some sense. Blaming stores for sales they made last week does not.
The stores should be allowed to raise prices in the face of increased demand, but the average voter thinks that is some form of theft. So stores can only implement quantity limits.
The videos I see on Reddit about stores allowing a maximum quantity of toilet paper show that it’s possible to stop customers of buying all the things.
And in case someone claims an emergency, it’s not hard to verify such a claim.
FYI, the World Health Organization has published a guide to the local production of hand sanitizer. [0]. There also numerous other recipes available online. While there are retail shortages of hand sanitizer, bulk quantities of ethanol and isopropyl alcohol are readily available directly from manufacturers and third-party sites like ebay.
> Shkreli was charged in federal court, then convicted on two counts of securities fraud and one count of conspiring to commit securities fraud. In 2018, Shkreli was sentenced to seven years in federal prison and up to $7.4 million in fines.
> Mr. Colvin is sitting on 17,700 bottles of the stuff
> Mr. Colvin does not believe he was price gouging. While he charged $20 on Amazon for two bottles of Purell that retail for $1 each
> “If I can make a slight profit, that’s fine,” he said. “But I’m not looking to be in a situation where I make the front page of the news for being that guy who hoarded 20,000 bottles of sanitizer that I’m selling for 20 times what they cost me.”
>> “If I can make a slight profit, that’s fine,” he said. “But I’m not looking to be in a situation where I make the front page of the news for being that guy who hoarded 20,000 bottles of sanitizer that I’m selling for 20 times what they cost me.”
That quote is out of context. He was hoping to make a large profit selling anonymously on Amazon. Now that he's been blocked from doing that, he has to try to break even selling locally (and surprise, surprise, he's much more concerned about his reputation when doing that).
I think this quote from him captures his situation much better:
> “It’s been a huge amount of whiplash,” he said. “From being in a situation where what I’ve got coming and going could potentially put my family in a really good place financially to ‘What the heck am I going to do with all of this?’”
This kind of behavior was already quite aggravating before the pandemic. Whenever something new comes to the market in potentially limited quantities, "clever" people start buying up stock from the stores just to put it on ebay etc., causing the product to be unavailable for any reasonable customer.
This is annoying enough, when it concerns an item you just would like to be able to buy, but when it concerns items, that people depend on, and be it as simple as toilet paper, I think this should be prosecuted as criminal behavior.
I'll bite. How do you propose we distribute scarce resources? There isn't enough for everyone.
Do we distribute to those who waited in line the longest -- thereby contributing nothing to society in return?
Or do we distribute to those whose level of desire and need motivate them to trade for the highest amount of their own services to society, via money?
This man is a crucial mechanism for the latter.
Capitalism is a bitch. But it's the least shitty of the shitty systems we've ever tried.
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[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 185 ms ] threadhttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_gouging
Even if he is not breaking laws, he is doing morally reprehensible thing.
I'd say the good version of this would be buying up hand sanitizer in January, selling it for markup yesterday.
And if somebody is mad that you're making money, tell people a certain percentage of the profits goes to charity.
Vast majority of hoarders don't hoard nearly that much.
Vast majority of hoarders don't plan on exploiting people.
Organizations that really need it probably aren't going to be buying from a sketchy Amazon marketplace seller.
We had a similar case in Canada where a Vancouver couple talked to a newspaper about their enterprise and it just left me pondering what they thought the outcome would be. People respecting their "hustle" and business savvy?
Anti-gouging laws are applied (it seems) after every major hurricane. I hear the news talk about how to report gouging incidents, for example.
Prosecutions occur often enough that I'm surprised to hear you say they don't have a constitutional basis. Surely that would have been tested by now (and from what I can tell, it has, and not found to be unconstitutional).
Yes, there are limits on what the state can do with regards to interstate trade. But most anti-gouging laws are state laws, and not really subject to direct US Federal Constitution limits.
So, could you explain more about how they are dubious?
I responded to someone who claimed that what he is doing "could get him convicted of crimes in several states". While he could potentially face sanction, he isn't going to be convicted of anything.
"But most anti-gouging laws are state laws, and not really subject to direct US Federal Constitution limits."
Are you seriously arguing that state laws aren't subject to the constitution? What a wild discussion.
The number of actual convictions from these laws are absolutely minuscule, targeted only at major players, and a number of them fell on a constitutional challenge.
"Prosecutions occur often enough"
No, no they don't. You could count them on one hand. Don't confuse the big show about such laws with actual enforcement of them -- most such laws aren't even written to be enforceable (South Carolina, for instance, bans "unconscionable" pricing, which is legally meaningless). They are a showy discouragement and public placation.
Let me go back to your first paragraph-
"That doesn't make wage theft right." [arguing by association that I'm somehow saying that price gouging is right]
Apologies for the (necessary) wording, but fuck that disingenuous, obnoxious strawman. Nowhere did I say it was right. It is heinous. It is socially reprehensible. It is obnoxious behavior, and hopefully as supplies equalize this asshole and everyone like him are caught with a garage full of these things. But if people depend upon the law to discourage people this they're going to be disappointed.
I will pick two specific things:
"Are you seriously arguing that state laws aren't subject to the constitution?"
My question, restated, is what part of the US constitution do you think prohibits anti-gouging laws?
Is it the commerce clause? Is it a civil rights violation?
As a concrete example, Maryland's price gouging law concerning generic drug pricing was found unconstitutional in 2018, because of its effect on interstate commerce - http://www.fdalawblog.net/2018/04/fourth-circuit-finds-maryl... .
However, the anti-gouging laws discussed here are not interstate commerce. So, what is non-constitutional argument you refer to?
"You could count [prosecutions] on one hand."
Really? What is the basis for your statement?
DDG quickly helped me find the following 6 links, including one mentioning 15 lawsuits in Florida and another how '78 gas stations and other businesses gouged customers' in Georgia and had to pay fines.
1. "John Shepperson was one of the "gougers" authorities arrested" - https://abcnews.go.com/2020/Stossel/story?id=1954352&page=1
2. "The Sonoma County District Attorney's Office has filed three misdemeanor price gouging complaints against six landlords who allegedly raised home rental prices more than 10 percent after a declaration of emergency during the North Bay wildfires in October." - https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/six-santa-rosa-landlor...
3. "One man was even arrested for charging an elderly woman $18,000 to remove two fallen trees — the equivalent of nearly $29,000 today — according to a 1996 News & Observer article." - https://www.newsobserver.com/news/politics-government/articl...
4. "So far, the Governor’s Office of Consumer Affairs has probed 197 of those complaints and determined that 78 gas stations and other businesses gouged customers. Those businesses agreed to pay Georgia tens of thousands of dollars in fines and offer refunds to victims for overcharges." - https://www.ajc.com/news/local/refunds-promised-for-gas-goug...
5. "NC attorney general files lawsuit against tree company over alleged price gouging in Wilmington" - https://www.wral.com/attorney-general-josh-stein-filed-a-law...
6. "Since Attorney General Charlie Crist took office in 2002, the state has launched 72 formal investigations of alleged gouging and filed 15 lawsuits. “In 2004 and 2005, with each successive storm we saw fewer and fewer complaints about price gouging,” said Crist spokeswoman JoAnn Carrin. The law, she said, is having a deterrent effect." - http://www.nbcnews.com/id/12498071...
You specifically claimed that these were state laws and thus were not subject to federal constitutional limits, which is absurdly wrong. Why you would even inject that, and then strangely start spinning in a different direction, is left for one to wonder.
Then again, you also grotesquely misrepresented my post, so I understand your comment has zero sincerity and instead you're just stomping your feet and saying "gouging bad!" despite agreement by all parties.
As to your "I did a Google search" --
Again, convictions. John Shepperson was not convicted. No one is EVER convicted. Anyone who contests the fines see them dissolved. It's a feel good for stupid people.
You write that I wrote "and thus were not subject to federal constitutional limits"
I was more nuanced. I said "not really subject to direct US Federal Constitution limits".
There is no direct Federal Constitution limit on anti-gouging laws. (By comparison, see the direct prohibition on slavery (except as punishment for a criminal conviction)).
Therefore, if something isn't constitutional it must derive from some other principle, like the commerce clause, or perhaps interpretation.
Which is it?
Now, I am a programmer, with no legal training or political science training past high school classes. It's entirely possible that I have the terminology wrong. But I don't see how it's so wrong as to rate your response.
You constructed a quote from me: "I did a Google search"
As I wrote, I used DuckDuckGo. I realize "Google search" has taken on the generic meaning of "web search", but point it out as part of what seems to be your pattern of re-interpreting what I wrote in a way which I thought I was clear to not say.
"Again, convictions"
I think you have misread the thread.
The OP wrote "This guy did something that at a minimum will make him a pariah in his community and at worst could get him convicted of crimes in several states"
You rejected "convicted".
Sure. I'm fine with that. Because that wasn't my point. I wrote "Prosecutions occur often enough that I'm surprised to hear you say they don't have a constitutional basis." I even showed how one anti-gouging law was found invalid because of its conflict with the commerce clause. But that finding was specific to the details of that law.
You then followed up with "No, no they don't. You could count them on one hand." The "they" in this case was "prosectutions", because your text directly quoted what I wrote on prosecutions. It was not about convictions.
So no, I did not bring up John Shepperson as an example of being jailed. I brought him up as an example of being prosecuted. Which was exactly the issue you said happened fewer than 6 times.
You write "Anyone who contests the fines see them dissolved".
I did point out that "78 gas stations and other businesses" in GA were fined. I suppose you'll say they weren't contested and dissolved because it was cheaper to pay the fine than to contest.
But honestly, I don't care. I want to know how anti-gouging laws are "of dubious constitutional basis", not how they are of dubious effectiveness.
You have yet to address that issue.
Unconstitutional because there is no such thing as a "fair" cost for things, and when the state intrudes on commerce in a capricious, arbitrary manner it is unconstitutional, as has been shown countless times in countless cases.
This isn't difficult. Though again you accuse me of misreading the thread. LOL.
What part of the constitution are you referencing? Which court cases? I've looked for a couple of hours, but failed to find anything.
Without something concrete, I will conclude your original statement about dubiousness is unsupported.
Why are all anti-gouging laws necessarily capricious and arbitrary? Certainly some may be, but some are no less capricious and arbitrary than saying that 21 is the legal drinking age or that the speed limit on a given highway is 65 mph.
Eg, "During a declared emergency, selling goods and services at a price that is at least 10% higher than it was immediately preceding the declaration." - https://consumer.findlaw.com/consumer-transactions/price-gou...
Anti-gouging laws are a subset of price controls. The US has had price controls before. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_controls#United_States .
If what you say is true, then how are price controls constitutional but anti-gouging laws are not?
The basic moral standard is don't be an asshole, especially not when people are desperate. You're failing that.
For a longer comment from a healthcare worker of note, see section 2 here: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/04/30/buspirone-shortage-in-...
It’s no different than if, e.g., you have a store in some corrupt cartel controlled territory where they extorted your for protection money, which makes you have to increase your prices in order to recover that cost from everyone else’s. No different in terms of accounting, even if you try to absorb some of the costs to not make others suffer as much and you and your family take on even more individual suffering for it. These are all logical and predictable things, seeing the future level predictable, they’re so basic.
You clearly seem to think that it’s somehow not the logical consequence of the system as it is. Why is that? What we are actually facing and what Europe will unfortunately for them soon enough face, is a shift from a kind of preemptive system to a reactionary system, the consequences and costs of immediate gratification drawing down on the reserves built up through delayed gratification and forward thinking; the fable of the grasshopper and the ants. Insulin can only be $7 when all other costs of the system are covered; they are not, so insulin costs $300 instead to make up for the massive losses elsewhere taking care of tens of millions of foreign nationals in the USA who have never paid into the system that is being destroyed by their drawing down the reserves and capacity.
It’s all very clear and logical, and inevitable, regardless of the fact that I don’t like it either. We seem to have a far bigger problem with misunderstanding of the facts and reality though. You want $7 insulin?figure out how to make all the foreign nationals pay up for the system built and paid into over many decades and generations, or at least for the full cost of the services they consume. That is the only way you get $7 insulin, or even cheaper insulin.
Evidence?
you pay with data, that is not free
"Even via Social sign-in" ...
Really?! How generous of them.
Not even worth a bugmenot attempt.
The second is that hand sanitizer isn't even necessary, soap and water is better, and people paying $7 for a bottle of hand sanitizer are ignorant when they could just buy a bar of soap.
You basically can't get out of an office bathroom without realistically touching several surfaces of questionable cleanliness for a contagious pathogen, for example.
No it doesn't. The study you refer to was one specific virus (influenza-A) that simulated essentially coughing directly onto your hands. Where the virus was encased in large volume of mucus.
That isn't how people use sanitizer. It's for dry contact displacement, and there it is incredibly effective. You should still wash your hands when you can, of course, but these misleading claims aren't helping anything.
Coronavirus's are a class of viruses well known to be susceptible to deactivation by alcohol exposure [2].
1. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S019567011...
2. https://www.livescience.com/how-long-coronavirus-last-surfac...
Sanitizer is useful in situations where you can't wash your hands. Like when you get out of the subway system.
On the other hand, putting gloves helps me avoid touching my face, so I'd go for that.
How about when you get off the subway and need to grab a quick lunch at small establishment that doesn't have bathrooms?
In NYC, many lunch places have only maybe 4-10 seats at a window or something. The law says they don't need to provide a bathroom, and they usually don't (no space).
Or even if you go to McDonald's or something, there's often a line of like 5 people each taking 10 minutes inside the single bathroom. (Welcome to New York.)
Hand sanitizer is literally the only way many times not to get the virus from your hands into your mouth when eating.
>> Society helped. >> Eventual HUGE profits.
Good people c.q people able and willing to pay outnumber "bad" people or people who can't afford it by a huge margin. Can't go wrong!
“But I’m not looking to be in a situation where I make the front page of the news for being that guy who hoarded 20,000 bottles of sanitizer that I’m selling for 20 times what they cost me.”
If you don't have laws and rules based society, you might be killed for doing that. 100 year ago this guy could easily get a beating or tarring and feathering type punishment.
It's amazing that some person can do that and don't think that they might be doing something really wrong, at least ethically. He want's publicity for his stunt.
If you could sell it in a way that convinced the CEO’s of these companies that they would get even richer over it, however, it would happen tomorrow.
It seems fairly trivial to make (Aloe Vera + alcohol).
https://www.money.pl/gospodarka/plyn-do-dezynfekcji-rak-orle...
You can do credit cards through PayPal or even use the Web Payments API that let you do secure payments on the web via a company like Stripe and that will work with Apple and Google Pay.
It’s not like Amazon has a sterling reputation for selling legitimate goods.
If you do know the goods are fake and you pay with a credit card, you dispute it with your credit card company.
That’s not only about Amazon and Ebay, but also depending on SEO on Google, the app stores, etc.
Of course. Courts and parents are supposed to be fair, the market isn't. Market dynamics are useless in the face of a pandemic - the virus is not a market participant and has no conception of property rights.
On a sinking ship, bailing water out out of only your cabin is a pretty stupid plan.
That is exactly what he is doing.
I don't mean why you think they should do so, or might, but do you know the actual reasoning applied by the legislatures at the time of enactment?
Not to mention, a buyer can just do something like claim to be getting these for the ER 30 miles down the road. So what's a good store to do then?
A store needs to experience a run on merchandise and also (through some other information channel) come to understand that this is actually a bad enough thing to override their normal business imperatives to sell the stuff they have.
Blaming stores for sales they make today makes some sense. Blaming stores for sales they made last week does not.
And in case someone claims an emergency, it’s not hard to verify such a claim.
[0] https://www.who.int/gpsc/5may/Guide_to_Local_Production.pdf
1. Sell the hand-sanitizers for a penny each to build goodwill.
2. Set up a Kickstarter to make back his losses.
Otherwise, he is going to get some serious grief from his community and end up like Martin Shkreli.
fabulously wealthy and with a hot russian girlfriend?
> Mr. Colvin does not believe he was price gouging. While he charged $20 on Amazon for two bottles of Purell that retail for $1 each
> “If I can make a slight profit, that’s fine,” he said. “But I’m not looking to be in a situation where I make the front page of the news for being that guy who hoarded 20,000 bottles of sanitizer that I’m selling for 20 times what they cost me.”
That quote is out of context. He was hoping to make a large profit selling anonymously on Amazon. Now that he's been blocked from doing that, he has to try to break even selling locally (and surprise, surprise, he's much more concerned about his reputation when doing that).
I think this quote from him captures his situation much better:
> “It’s been a huge amount of whiplash,” he said. “From being in a situation where what I’ve got coming and going could potentially put my family in a really good place financially to ‘What the heck am I going to do with all of this?’”
This is annoying enough, when it concerns an item you just would like to be able to buy, but when it concerns items, that people depend on, and be it as simple as toilet paper, I think this should be prosecuted as criminal behavior.
Or do we distribute to those whose level of desire and need motivate them to trade for the highest amount of their own services to society, via money?
This man is a crucial mechanism for the latter.
Capitalism is a bitch. But it's the least shitty of the shitty systems we've ever tried.
they didn't create anything (except shortages where these things are needed), they don't deserve anything (except profitering charges)