emergency price fixing

Now that I know my father survived Hurricane Charlie, I'll turn to the inevitable government idiocy that followed.

One of the most basic laws of supply & demand is the law of price fixing:

• Price ceilings (when the State mandates a maximum price below the free-market price) cause shortages.
• Price floors (when the State mandates a minimum price above the market-clearing price) cause gluts.

Whenever supply and demand are unbalanced, look for price fixing.

If you can't understand price fixing, you can't understand anything in economics. This means you should refrain from holding or expressing any opinions on any economic subject whatsoever!

Laws against "price gouging" are price-fixing laws. The fact that they apply only in emergencies doesn't change the economic effects of price fixing, which is that mandatory price ceilings cause shortages. What the government is doing is causing artificial shortages during emergencies!

I'd like to link to Jim Cox's chapter on Price Gouging in his book, The Concise Guide to Economics, but that website is on the inaccessible host machine for another few days, so instead I'll link to a couple of recent articles on the issue:

Anti-Gouging Idiocy, by Roderick Long

Anti-Price-Gouging Laws Harm Consumers, by Sheldon Richman