Unbridled compassion is a dangerous emotion as it often results in horrible even deadly outcomes8/30/2017 Will ECON 101 professors now have to issue 'trigger warnings' when discussing the economics of price controls? • AEI "Boy, people are easily triggered these days! Who would have thought that a columnist writing about basic principles of ECON 101 would cause such a triggered reaction to basic economic logic that an organization like Forbes would remove Tim Worstall’s article “Hurricane Harvey Is When We Need Price Gouging, Not Laws Against It” from its website. That original link above to the article was taken down by Forbes a day or two after it first appeared on Sunday, allegedly in response to a hurricane of triggered responses, but you can find a cached version here." More below. "What did Worstall write that was so “offensive” to Forbes readers? Here’s a sample of his “triggering” analysis of ECON 101 and price controls (emphasis mine): Hurricane Harvey has hit Texas and is doing a great deal of damage to both life and property. Which is exactly when we need, positively desire, there to be price gouging, instead of the laws we have against it. The basic underlying economics being that we want whatever scarce resources there are to be applied to their most valuable uses. Further, we want to encourage the provision of more supply of them–both of these being the things which the price system manages for us. That is, allowing prices to rise in the aftermath of a disaster does exactly what we want to happen. The economics of this is really terribly, terribly, simple. As a result of the disaster–of any disaster that is–some things are in short supply. Perhaps because some of the supply got damaged, or perhaps because people need to substitute. Floods could, for example, knock out the municipal water supply, leaving people needing bottled water. So relative to the available supply demand has risen. We now need some method of rationing that limited and scarce supply over that increased demand. Rationing by price is always the efficient way of doing this. We also want something else to happen–we want supply to increase as fast as we can manage that. As we know from our basic Econ 101 supply and demand curves the way to increase supply is for the price to increase. We want, for example, people to start trucking bottled water from Louisiana to Texas. More money to be made by doing so will encourage people to do so. And as that extra supply arrives then prices will go down again as demand is met. We want people to use less of the scarce resource, we want people to supply more of the scarce resource, allowing the price to rise is the one known way of achieving both those goals. So, why is it that we have these laws against it all? The answer is that we’re human, we are interested in both efficiency and equity and the people more interested in that equity are the ones who have written these laws. The balance, to my mind at least, going much too far toward that equity and against that efficiency. My own version of dealing with price gougers would be to thank them for the good work they’re doing." The compassion of these people will result is the increased suffering and death after Harvey, and other natural disasters. This is unacceptable. But arguing with these incompetents is worthless. They cannot control their need to act "compassionately" for people, regardless of the consequences. This emotion is very similar to the Oedipal mother who controls her son offering him a life a simple leisure in exchange that he remain forever with the mother. In both cases, this is an infantilization of the individual. In both cases, the results are extraordinarily destructive to the individual, while the Oedipal mother and the compassionate individual is enlivened by the idea of "doing good." These "compassionate" emotions must be controlled.
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