Make Power Gouging a Crime

Dear Jim,

frankly speaking, I think the petition to make "gasoline price gouging a federal crime" (http://pol.moveon.org/stoppricegouging/) is stupid and dangerous. If political stupidity was a climate gas, our planet would have been incinerated quite some time ago...

Here just some arguments against:

- Price gouging happens when someone has a monopoly on a needed good or service and thus can dictate the price to consumers. The only organization having a forced monopoly on certain goods and services currently is the state (and state licensed monopolies). The government thus is the only group that can (and systematically does) engage in price gouging on a massive scale! It can do so because it has the monopoly on coercion, which it uses generously- not only abroad, but also at home. To suggest that the government as the price gouger #1 should make price gauging a crime (i.e. use its own monopoly instruments of coercion to bring it under its own price gauging monopoly) is absurd and will not only legalize and increase price gouging but als makes it enforcible by power of gun!

- the market, as long as there is no forced intervention by governments, is the most sensitive, because ultimately consumer driven, mechanism to dynamically balance demand and supply. Oil prices translate into gas prices by consumer demand and supply factors. Government interventions like a war in Iraq, increased taxation at the pump or forced biofuel additives (which in addition to market factors are seasonably highly price sensitive) are by far the biggest factors of price increases at the pump.

- Price fluctuation in a market free of forced intervention is a very useful and efficient mechanism to adapt to whatever influences the consumers and producers are experiencing. This could be scarcity, climate, new ideas and values, technical innovations, hopes and fears, political stability, natural disasters, different habits and preferences etc... The less this adaptation process is interfered with, the more intelligent and timely it can work. Attempts of price gouging by free market participants so far have all failed in the long run, because they encourage competition like nothing else does!

- Even apparently reasonable arguments for government intervention in markets based on alleged "market failures" do not increase the adaptive potential of society, but in fact decrease it, because it lowers what could be called the emerging intelligence (sometimes also called "collective intelligence", but this term obscures the fact that it is an emerging whole and not a tangible entity) of society: government intervention is not the AGGREGATION of the intelligence expressed by the emerging results of the many voluntary decisions of all market participants, but the SUBSTITUTION of this distributed intelligence for the limited intelligence of a small group of politicians (with often different agendas in mind). To demand or even assist in the substitution of distributed intelligence for the limited intelligence of a small group holding the monopoly of coercion (= power), is like proposing that the chickens be protected by the fox, because he represents their collective intelligence...

- who could be interested in such a stupid proposal? Certainly not the chickens! All such proposals originate from groups of power seeking individuals, who either want to get coercive powers in their own hands or who want to benefit from such powers. Their personal business plans are more than often sustainable jobs in NGOs that seek government subsidies or donations from companies and the public. Most of these NGOs are either modern protection rackets claiming to protect the environment or the poor, or they promise undeliverable goods like social justice and other qualitative values, which they try to quantify. Of course they cannot deliver either, because qualitative values cannot by quantified in principle, so they get into the eternal power game of raising fears and exploiting hopes. Just look at their slogans and demands and you will find this consistent pattern, both with governments and with groups striving for governmental powers...

If you want to stop price gouging, make it a crime to intervene by coercive means in the lives of people including free markets. Make power gouging a crime! You might have your jails full of politicians, but you also have ended wars and taxes!

Cheers,

AdLib