I could make macaroni out of John Stossel’s twisted logic in his “In praise of price gouging“:
Thanks to JPol for sending the latest ravings from the 20/20 nutcase. (Poor Hugh Downs. It must slay him to have to listen to that crap.)
Update [2005-9-11 7:58:29 by susanhu]: While Stossel touts price gouging, citizens and the non-profit Habitat for Humanity are working to build and preserve housing affordable for NOLA’s poorer citizens. MSNBC aired footage of Harry Connick, Jr. in hip-waders helping rescue residents, including one very elderly, feeble man. Connick first gave the nearly naked man his t-shirt, and then carried the man to the boat and an ambulance.
MSNBC reported that Connick has agreed to be honorary chair of the Habitat For Humanity project to rebuild housing for the poor of New Orleans. Habitat’s Web site is chock full of its specific activities to help the Gulf victims, including “Operation Home Delivery,” a three-phase response. More activities are on the home page.There are ways you can help Habitat for Humanity.
If you have the money to purchase the water, the housing, or the medical treatment, you have the freedom to do so without government interference. You may purchase as much as you can afford.
If you do not have the money, you are empowered to earn as much money as someone will agree to pay you.
If your labor is valued at less than the purchase price of items needed for survival, you have the freedom to accept your fate and be thankful that your financial superiors have worked hard to protect you from socialism. This is believed to be the happiest possible death.
The happiest posible death unless you live in Africa. There the happiest death is to die from AIDS in order to be spared from having sex with a condom.
I was actually just getting ready to send you an email with the link for that demented and sick logic of Stossel’s susan. Glad someone else did. I read that the day before yesterday and just can’t get that out of my head.
My sister thought I was making it up or that it was really a news item from somewhere like the Onion..no such luck. I had to actually show here where I had read it.
She also suggested I send it to Olberman for his ‘Worst Person in the World’ segment…and the Daily Show.
My reaction was similar. I was certain at first that Stossel was being facetious, and that somewhere in the piece he would make his real point. But that was his real point. When I sent it to Susan I wrote “Stossel thinks the heroes of New Orleans are the price gougers who charge $20 for a bottle of water (and believe it or not, I am not being facetious). This reminds me of Swift’s essay, “A Modest Proposal,” where he advocated eating the young as a solution to the population crisis… only Swift was writing satire. Can no one at ABC realize that they have nothing but a demented Troglodite in John Stossel?
He really exemplifies the shit for brains phrase. I happened to catch him on C-Span about a year or so ago and he was talking to I think some young repukes on the wonderfullnes of the republican model for government and trickle down theory and how business should have no regulations at all..those meany democrats just didn’t get it he said..or some such garbage like that..I think he also mentioned that he can be a reporter and be biased or something..I’m sure I’m not remembering this all correctly because I was so pissed and couldn’t watch the whole thing anyway.
What I would like is to see someone rip that phony looking mustache off his stupid face-for starters anyway.
Henry Hazlitt’s classic economic text Econmics in One Lesson deals with this issue directly.
While any sort of price gouging may be good for the gouger, it hurts not only the victim, but the overall economy. It diverts goods and capital that might have otherwise gone toward progress into paying too much for basic goods. Likewise, all those people who talk about how a disaster can “ultimately be good for the economy” are sucking wind. It never works that way.
Stossel’s false logic only works (provisionally) if everyone has the $20 to spend on the water or if the gouger is willing to sell the water for less to help keep someone hydrated even if they can’t pay.
But, if everyone could afford the $20 price then, due to market forces, the normal price would be $20. And if the gouger was willing to let thewater go forless, even much less,out of humanitarian concern, then he’d be a failed gouger.
Either way, Stossel is full of his usual shit.
I took this quite personally and figured that asshole just condemned me death because frankly I wouldn’t have the dollar(unless my sister happened to be with me)much less 20 dollars for the goddamn bottle of water.
Yes! The mechanistic and fractured logic of these compulsive objectivists has no room for humanity.
Their ideology would work fine for a bunch of Stepford robots, but in the real world they’re an ongoing disaster.
Just imagine how loudly a shitbird like Stossel would have been screaming if he’d been stuck in a flooded NO because his car broke down. He’d be suing the car manufacturer and the city and the state and the Feds and everyone else because his life was inconvenienced.
Funny you mention water– a month ago he had one of his little 20/20 “give me a break” segments on bottled water vs. “tap water” (specifically NYC water) and how gotham tap water is just as tasty and pure as bottled water.
Dude picked an interesting city to test the water… you’d think NYC tap water would be pretty gnarly (and honestly staten island water was a lil milkier than one would like), but most of Gotham’s water is from the Catskills which is pretty damn good water…
Now if he would do some water tests pitting evian or poland springs bottled water against woburn, ma or salisbury, md tap water… Now that might get interesting.
Here’s another Cato Institute wingnut gasbag on the benefits of price-gouging.
Link here.
by raising health insurance to a price where 45,000,000 people don’t stock up on it because they don’t need it.
The price gougers only the save lives of those that can afford it.
Yet another example of how the ultra-free market simply doesn’t work. Reading right-wing commentary about this hurricane is just disgusting. The plight of the people and the deaths and disease is all blamed on the “nanny state” and a lack of self-reliance. How self-reliance would have protected them from hurricane-force winds is never adequately explained.
Then the mask usually comes off and passionate screeds calling for a return to the days of their fathers, when men were expected to “be a man” and “provide for their family” and shit like that.
I wish someone would explain to me how a ‘free market’ economy exists with vast subsidies to protected industries who,now that the economy is on the skids, get to float on tax money,while simultaneously screwing not only the consumer,but their shareholders.
Starting to look like state socialism Soviet style to me.
Funny thing Yakov Smirnoff said once—
“We pretend to work,and they pretend to pay us”.
But let us not forget the ‘golden parachute’– I hope it lands in Rethug hell.
GRRRRRRRRRR