If it’s coercion, then it assumes defined property rights, and there’s an actionable violation of property rights. The discussion is over. What’s the question?
All your talk of a correct or fair price, exploitation and whatnot, makes me think you’re make at the price system, meaning you dislike the way the market works. But that’s how the markets work, and it’s a good thing. Here’s a five minute video you should check out, being somewhat related to the idea of a “correct price” and “exploitation of information and situations.”
If it’s coercion, then it assumes defined property rights, and there’s an actionable violation of property rights.
The seller did not violate any rights.
Great vid, really. I love stuff like that- concise, clear, catchy, and above all- rational. It achieved the opposite of what I suppose you intented (me having more confidence in the market instead of less), but I really loved the video.
Papirius, would you elaborate on why it made you less confident in the market’s ability to allocate resources effectively?
This is not catallactic reasoning. Value can only be spoken of when it is expressed by action. You cannot sell something less than what you value it at. You are obfuscating the role of temporality in value judgements; the act of setting a price and selling a good are exclusive events.
Papirius, would you elaborate on why it made you less confident in the market’s ability to allocate resources effectively?
Because market’s “effective allocation” is effective only on the level of the whole system, which is irrelevant for the starting question of the diabetic child who will, as I see, die with or without price gouging banned, if it’s banned, because someone else will buy the generator, if it isn’t, because they can’t afford it. It’s like the NAP in it’s interpretation that excludes interventions- it’s illegitimate to intervene even in someone’s interest, becasue “protecting people from the results of their folly will result in those people being fool”. The problem is that results of your misjudgement don’t teach you anything if they kill you.
I don’t see the point in covering of even mentioning such topics from a perspective of someone who has apriori accepntance of NAP (in that interpretation) and, in this case, voluntarist free market; any objection that is about consequences should be plainly answered by “I don’t care about consequences”.
This is not catallactic reasoning. Value can only be spoken of when it is expressed by action. You cannot sell something less than what you value it at.
I don’t accept that exchange value as the only value.
Enlightenment thinkers and socialists are against usury?
Papirius, did you happen to see this post of mine?
Seems I’ve skipped it.
By that reasoning, he’s entitled to get whatever he asks for in exchange
He’s not entitled to anything, but being that he is an owner of a property, he should decide what the value of the property is, not someone who is not it’s owner. Price gouging, IMO, is a kind of a fraud, because if you sell a commodity at a certain price (you value it as much you say when setting the price), gouging the price relative to the buyer is lying, it’s basically contradicting yourself- first you say it’s worth that much to you, but they you say it’s worth something else to you, and coincidentally, that change of opinion about how much that property is worth changes with the potentional buyer’s need or purchasing power. I know people see that as “entrepreneurship”, but I see it as lying and fraud.
Also a note that commodities have intristic value- cost value is the natural (‘intristic’) value and the minimum of the price which appears in perfect competition when price becomes so low that other possible competitor sellers don’t have incentive to enter the competition and offer a lower price because it wouldn’t pay off (they would be in loss). So basically, prices bigger that the cost value are results of imperfect competition, of natural or artificial monopolies (or oligopolies), and the smaller ones are products of predatory pricing (which, as anti-competition practice, results in oligopolies).
I think it’s justified on the basis of “common purpose” (also known as “joint enterprise”). Think of a bank robbery. The person driving the getaway car may not have violated anyone’s rights, if he stayed in the car during the actual heist, but he was nevertheless part of the overall effort. Another situation where I think “common purpose/joint enterprise” applies is one person hiring a second person to murder a third person.
But the seller in my example is not in sort of deal with the coercer, he is just taking advantage of a situation.
As I see it, considering price gouging to be a kind of fraud means considering the buyer to be entitled to a particular price. If you disagree, then I ask you to please lay out your reasoning for your disagreement.
Let me ask you this: where do you think value exists? Do you think it exists within property, if it exists at all? Or do you think it exists within the mind?
That’s something you didn’t mention before. So if a commodity necessarily has an intrinsic value, how can anyone give it a different value? Regardless, just what do you think determines the cost value of something? (I’m guessing you’ll say its cost value is determined by its producer’s (necessarily subjective) appraisal of what it took to produce it.)
I was addressing your objection about the seller not violating anyone else’s rights. Yes, there’s a difference between the bank-robbery situation I described and the seller-taking-advantage situation that you described, namely what you just mentioned. That wasn’t relevant to my point though.
But since you bring it up now, I’ll address it. Let’s say a bank launders money for some professional thieves. It loans out some of the money from the thieves to a businessman, who has no idea that he received stolen money. He invests it in his business and turns over a nice profit as a result. I would say that, since he benefitted from activity that I think is immoral, even though he had no knowledge of it, he’s nevertheless connected to the immoral activity.
On the other hand, I don’t see why the seller would have any motivation to charge the buyer under compulsion a higher price unless he at least knew about him being under compulsion. It’s on that basis that I consider the seller to be similarly connected to the immoral activity.
As I see it, considering price gouging to be a kind of fraud means considering the buyer to be entitled to a particular price.
The buyed is entitled not be defrauded.
Let me ask you this: where do you think value exists? Do you think it exists within property, if it exists at all? Or do you think it exists within the mind?
Define value. And define exist. And mind. Just kidding, don’t. But value exists both in minds and in outer reality, in social relations and goods, directly or indirectly.
So if a commodity necessarily has an intrinsic value, how can anyone give it a different value?
If slavery is illegitimate how is it possible that slaves exist?
Regardless, just what do you think determines the cost value of something? (I’m guessing you’ll say its cost value is determined by its producer’s (necessarily subjective) appraisal of what it took to produce it.)
Yes, labor value is subjective, psychological, but labor is not the only cost, a laborer has to live. If I life of making one type of product, I’m not going to sell it bellow a price that I can’t live off, and whether I’m alive or have died of starvation is not determined by my subjective opinion.
On the other hand, I don’t see why the seller would have any motivation to charge the buyer under compulsion a higher price unless he at least knew about him being under compulsion. It’s on that basis that I consider the seller to be similarly connected to the immoral activity.
If I know that someone’s forcing you to buy an item, and I’m the only one who sells that item, I know I can raise the price to basically everything you have and (if price gouging is not fraud), I have not aggressed against, stolen from or defrauded you, that is- I have done nothing wrong.
Ergo, you believe that the buyer is entitled to a particular price. I see no reason in trying to deny that.
Here’s my definition of “value”: “what one is willing to do in order to gain and/or keep something”. You’ll see that the implication of that definition of “value” is that value exists entirely within the mind.
Can you prove that value, as I’ve defined it above, exists independently of the mind? Otherwise, what definition of “value” are you (implicitly) using?
Please see the is-ought problem. I’m sorry but you’ve run headlong into it once again.
What do you think constitutes “living”? If a person doesn’t eat anything today, he’ll still be alive tomorrow (ceteris paribus). Would you say that it’s again up to the laborer as to what constitutes “living”?
And why do you think that is? You haven’t provided any explanation for that conclusion, and I don’t see how it necessarily follows from your premises.
You just don’t get the information disparity issue. No one has enough information to know what constitutes “effective resource allocation,” no one. The question is how do you work in such a system. Our brains are uniquely designed for this task, we are very good at learning and internalizing the lessons of experience as knowledge and wisdom. One man’s wisdom today is another man’s foolishness tomorrow. There are far too many different points of view for anyone to claim knowledge of the “right” way to allocate resources.
You’re statement misunderstands the problem. “… is effective only on the level of the whole system.” No, no, no! It’s effective on the individual level. What you don’t understand is that in every transaction, every exchange NO ONE gets everything they could possibly want. There is always unsatisfied desire within every man’s heart. He could always get more, want more, need more. The fact that this is true, is misunderstood. Effective allocation of resources doesn’t mean that everyone’s needs gets met, and the fact that everyone’s needs are not met cannot therefore be a criteria for calling the market ineffective
Are you kidding me?! So, let’s talk about how insulin appears in the market that keeps millions of diabetic children alive. Let’s talk about the generator technology and how generators save millions and millions of lives either directly or indirecly. Let’s go into the discovery, development, and production of just those two products, and all of the needed technologies that go into them. Go design that. You know how to point a gun at the guy buying the generator so that you can save the life of one kid, any of us can do that. Not a one of us can design, produce and make cheap the gun with which you do this. You think the market is cold, uncaring, and unforgiving. So is my computer, so is the gun. The plow doesn’t give a crap about you or feeding your family. The man running it doesn’t either. He cares about feeding his family. But somehow that plow is used to produce enough food to feed your family too.
Ignoring the lessons of economics, and the science we have that explains how complex systems work (dynamical systems with feedback in particular) is worse than the cold emotionless technology that we have. Political institutions and systems are no less technology than the products of physics and chemistry. The emotional reaction we all have to the plight of the weaker and downtrodden among us are there for a good reason. They are also notoriously fickle in that they can bind us into short term behaviors which hurt us severly and cause great devastation in the long run, but hey as you say later about the market and NAP, “I don’t care about the consequences.”
I compare that type of governance to my kid complaining about having to brush his teeth. Or the obese kid screaming and crying because mommy won’t buy him a candy bar. When we’re children, our parents provide a direct and authoritarian governance of our behaviors. At some point we get pushed out of the nest. So, which is it that we want from government? We can’t have both… If we get to vote for mommy, what kind of mom do you think we vote for? You act like one child’s potential or actual death, one poor person starving is so tragic that it requires the use of a gun and the inevitable destruction of civilization to save that one child. Now, I care enough about my kids to understand the feeling, but I don’t for a second believe that government can do anything other than systematically slow the rate of growth both in technological innovation and in actual production, or destroy civilization entirely. “Welcome back to the stone age…!”
Technically, I’d think of it from a systems point of view. It’s about increasing the friction or losses from those behaviors. And reducing the friction in directions that are beneficial. Personally, I’d drop thinking of the NAP in that way. It’s a great principle in that it puts a sharp line down that people can relate emotionally to. When you think about the real complexities of life, you realize things get muddy, life becomes shades of gray. Increasing friction to certain behaviors is not the equivalent of speaking in absolutes. Stealing other peoples stuff, threatening other people, should be harder, more painful. It should end up costing you more to do. The problem with government isn’t that it does these and it’s “Always wrong!” It’s that doing these things is made easier and less painful, less costly, government reduces the friction for theft, and increases the friction for what most of society considers to be legitimate and legal exercises of freedom.
Nope they don’t, let’s all sit around the campfire and smoke marshmallows and sing kumbayah… Meanwhile in the real world, your statement is true no MATTER WHAT!? Government can’t change that. At some point we’re all big boys and girls, we have to live or die as a direct consequence of our own actions. None of us live in isolation, nor can any of us really know the experience of living in another man’s shoes. We are social beings, we literally need touch, love and affection in order to develop emotionally and mentally. At the same time, we enter this world trapped inside a mind, inside of a specific body, and we’ll never know what it is to think another man’s thoughts, to feel his feelings. There’s a verse in the bible, that says “For now we see through a glass darkly…” That’s the experience of understanding another man. I kind of get it, but I don’t really know.
The humbling fact of reality is that at the end of the day, I’m doing my best for my kids to raise them, as my father did before me. I may simply not know enough, see enough, be enough, have the proper skills, etc. to prevent some future event from destroying their lives, and that’s just the way it is. I don’t stop trying. If my kid is dying and you have something in your hand that will prolong his life or save it, you’re damn right, I’d do just about anything to save it. That will always be true.
The glorious fact of capitalist societies, and in particular that provided for by Natural Property Rights, is that we get to shrink the quantity of those events. We can never reach 0, but we can get ever closer. But to make it easier, nay, to encourage throwing out private property, individual sovereignty (AND responsibility) to save people from one-off events is the height of foolishness. How can one not realize that the eventual result will be the collapse of modern civilization? Not the death of one lonely and desparate child, but the complete and total decimation of populations?!
We weep and cry for the one child starving with a bloated belly without the energy to wave away the flies swarming his eyes. We should. But can we not also be adult enough to realize that when we zoom out and watch a thousand children suffering from collateral damage from wars that are not they’re fault, that it’s 1000 times more egregious and tragic? That though we don’t see the millions of children dying from mumps and measles and crippled for life by polio, we are the children of that society? We are the children who’ve been spared that result, and not because of any fundamental greatness of my parent’s or yours, not because of any grand design or plan put forth by some President or Congress, but by billions and billions of individual man-hours spent by individual men, each of which simply plodded along day by day trying to make his own life slightly better than it was in the previous hour.
That is the heroic triumph of human action.
Again, I don’t have an a priori acceptance of NAP. If you look at my posts in this forum, you’ll see that I believe politics ought to be divided between theory (praxeological science) and technology (institutions and policy). I focus on certain fundamental flaws, which a praxeology provides context to. However, it can also draw from evolutionary theory and systems theory. One problem with modern political technology is that it’s focused on centralization of power instead of decentralization of power. The specific issue with democracy is that it allows us to erode the foundations of a theory of justice and law, that law ought to be focused on reducing risk and uncertainty for social and economic action by providing stable equality of access and results before the law, and by affirming and enforcing property rights that lead to the combination of sovereign use without absolving one of responsibility for that use. Finally, you’ll see that I believe the most egregious current political “wrong”, the one which is the most devastating to mankind is the inability of the weaker party of a hegemonic political relationship to withdraw (secession, emancipation, etc.).
Then you’re going to have a hard road in this forum. You need to get your head around the relationship between man’s teleological stance, his purposeful behavior, and the fact that to have purpose is to pursue a goal, or as we say an end. Without such ends, the very concept of “value” cannot exist. In fact, knowledge itself has no meaning apart from purposeful action. Man does not form knowledge without first adopting the intentional stance. But since he, a priori, is intentional, there can be no understanding of value that does not begin there.
Ergo, you believe that the buyer is entitled to a particular price. I see no reason in trying to deny that.
You define the right not be defrauded as a right to a particular price?
Otherwise, what definition of “value” are you (implicitly) using?
The real price of every thing, what every thing really costs to the man who wants to acquire it, is the toil and trouble of acquiring it.
If a person doesn’t eat anything today, he’ll still be alive tomorrow (ceteris paribus).
Define eat, do you use it as a respesentative of nutritiously sustaining one’s body? Also define alive, does it include being conscious, persistant vegetative state is also being alive, isnt’ it? Also, by tommorrow do you mean 24h later, or beyond midnight of that night, or as a representative notion of future undetermined time?
Please see the is-ought problem. I’m sorry but you’ve run headlong into it once again.
Are you an idiot or what? You’ve run into in it, I was being ironic as an answer to your pointless question.
And why do you think that is? You haven’t provided any explanation for that conclusion, and I don’t see how it necessarily follows from your premises.
Where was the aggression/ theft/ fraud?
I don’t, but it seems you do. The particular price is the seller’s original asking price, it seems.
And what do you think is the value of that toil and trouble?
I have no problem with your definitions of “eat” and “alive”. By “tomorrow”, you can assume that I mean “24 hours later”.
Perhaps you’d like to explain how I’ve run into the is-ought problem. Simply telling me that you haven’t, but that I have, won’t change my mind.
That doesn’t answer my question. Please try again.
That’s fine. I never said it was, but you chose to ignore my last sentence. The act of exchange demonstrates that both parties value what they are getting more than what they are forgoing. Do you deny that?
Furthermore, a person’s value is not something that can be set in time; it is constantly changing. And the only way of determining value is by seeing it demonstrated through action. When an exchange takes place we know apodictically that the order of sation recieved from the good acquired must be higher for the individual than that of the one forgone. That is the final demonstration of value an actor places on a good, when he gives it for something else.
So yes, a seller may place an initial value on a product, but that does not establish cosmic finality to the manner in which he values it.