In Praise of Price Gouging in Japan Disaster

With the disaster in Japan, there has been a run on the muller tubes that are the guts of a geiger counter.  A muller tubes is a gas filled cylinder that makes a clicking sounds as ionizing radiation passes through.  It make the click click click sounds you hear when someone passes a wand over something tested.

Since govts are reticent about offering facts, people need to verify radiation levels on their own: in general such as in the air, and specifically, that mess of vegetables.  Every maker in the world is sold out. Factories will not expand productions right now, because this disaster will pass, and what to do with the excess production capacity after the disaster?

The solution is price gouging.

People in Japan will pay an exorbitant amount for a geiger counter right now.  How much?  Well, a Japanese ebay would tell you.  Say they go for $100 normally, and stores are selling them for $10,000 each on an auction site.  The the whole world would know they are going for $10,000.   At that price, the maker can see if he opens a second line, he can cover the cost of the second line with the sales of 1000 at $10,000. So he goes into production, and sells at an exorbitant price.  Is he gouging?

A geiger counter will save lives.  People have money, but a shortage of geiger counters.  One geiger counter can get very busy in nuke disaster.  The fellow who paid $10,000 for his may very well check 1,000 edibles, water, food, air, etc, and charge $10 a pop to the general public to test foodstuffs, and recover his cost in say a week.  People will be glad to pay.

When the disaster has passed, the fellow can either put the geiger counter up for sale on ebay now, or save it for the next time a GE nuke fails, and make a killing off of it.

The first thing we need in a disaster is price gouging, it signals the demand, and organizes the means of production to solve the crisis.  Let the people in the disaster decide of the price is too high, if the seller is doing something odious, let the consumers decide if they appreciate the effort after the disaster has passed.

Anti-gouging laws are counter-productive, and leaves people at the mercy of the government in a disaster, such as at Katrina in NOLA.  The first responders in a disaster are the price-gougers, and they do more good than anyone else at relieving suffering.

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