Another natural disaster, another round of complaints about “price-gouging.” Per Business Insider, South Carolina’s attorney general reported 142 “price-gouging” complaints in the early aftermath of Hurricane Helene, while North Carolina’s AG claimed 64. Those numbers will  multiply as electricity and phone service gets restored in the hardest-hit areas.

One South Carolina example from the Business Insider story:  “[S]tores that have been putting out cases of bottled water for sale, but ringing up customers for each bottle individually.”

That is, charging the same price per bottle as previously — hardly “price gouging” — but without the usual discount for bulk “by the case” purchasing.

Or: Using normal, non-discounted, pricing to ration water so everybody can get at least some water, instead of a few customers taking home cases and other customers going without.

Even in cases of actual price increases (instead of temporarily ending bulk discounts), that’s the main effect so-called “price-gouging” has. Yes, you pay more for what you need … but you actually GET what you need for $2, instead of NOT getting what you need for $1.

Not, mind you, that sellers are “price-gouging” solely out of the goodness of their hearts. As Adam Smith pointed out centuries ago, “it is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest.”

What serves the self-interest of long-term, reputable merchants? Customer satisfaction.

Your grocer was glad to sell you food last week. He wants to sell you food next week. He’ll do his best to sell you food this week.

If the roads are blocked and the supply is limited, he’d rather charge more and have more customers get at least some what they’re looking for than charge less and have more customers see a “closed, everything’s gone” sign when they show up hungry and thirsty after difficult treks over storm-ravaged roads.

“Price-gouging” isn’t, as some people pretend, a case of market failure. It’s markets doing their job, in the face of dire circumstances, getting goods to the people who need them.

If the circumstances weren’t dire, “price-gouging” would be a terrible idea … and an impossible one, since competition from down the street would clean the “price-gouger’s” clock.

Yes, non-profit “mutual aid” is a beautiful thing. But when supplies are short, “price-gouging” is the next best thing, offering you an option other than praying to FEMA and hoping for the best.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter:@thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

If there’s such a thing as rolling in one’s grave, the seismographs around Santa Ana, California’s Fairhaven Memorial Park must be going nuts.  A Tesla motor couldn’t possibly top Raymond C. Hoiles’s revolutions per minute — at least if readership of the Orange County Register, the newspaper he bought in 1935 and gifted one of America’s most libertarian-leaning editorial bents, extends into the afterlife.

“There’s nothing wrong with requiring prisoners to work,” the Register‘s editorial board wrote on September 24, endorsing a “no” vote on Proposition 6.

Proposition 6, per California’s official voter guide, “Amends the California Constitution to remove current provision that allows jails and prisons to impose involuntary servitude to punish crime (i.e., forcing incarcerated persons to work).”

“[W]hat the proponents of Prop. 6 are calling involuntary servitude,” the board writes, “is really far more a matter of this: Not allowing prisoners who have been convicted of felonies that were injurious to real people, say, in effect, that they can’t be bothered to hold down a job while they are behind bars for their crimes.”

The question is not whether a prisoner should be “bothered to hold down a job.”

The question is not whether, as the Register notes, prison work benefits prisoners by equipping them with occupational skills, a work ethic, and some pocket change to buy snacks at the commissary.

The questions are:

First, is involuntary servitude — requiring someone to work on threat of punishment, and denying their right to quit — slavery?

The answer to that question is “yes.”

Second, should slavery be legal in cases where the plantation is a prison and the state is (at least temporarily) the slave owner?

The answer to that question is “no.”

Those answers do not seem like they’d be negotiable to Hoiles, who stood nearly alone among American newspapermen in opposing the internment of Japanese Americans after Pearl Harbor, and who late in life told the New York Times “government should exist only to try to protect the rights of every individual, not to redistribute the property, manipulate the economy, or establish a pattern of society.”

Mandatory prison work is redistribution, to the state, of the prisoner-slaves’ property rights in their labor. It is economically manipulative insofar as wages, if paid, are set by the state rather than by the market. And it’s an attempt to establish a pattern of society which treats people as property of the state.

If the government of California incarcerates people, it is the affirmative responsibility of the government of California to see to their basic material needs, not treat them as chattel.

Unfortunately, it can only do that through its partial enslavement, through taxation, of everyone else in California.

With mercy and charity in our hearts, we should pardon the Register‘s lapse of morality in this instance. But instead of buying into the editorial board’s odious and repugnant endorsement, we should encourage them to do better, and to get to work on the problem of ending the taxpayers’ partial enslavement, rather than supporting prisoners’ total enslavement.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter:@thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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“Donald Trump’s proposal to impose tariffs as high as 60 percent on imports from China, and a global tariff of 10 to 20 percent,” Oren Cass argues at The Atlantic, “takes the right approach to addressing globalization’s failures — but it has drawn resounding mockery from economists, and, in turn, from the mainstream media.”

While Cass, usually described as an “economic nationalist” or “national conservative,” cheerfully concedes that tariffs harm consumers in terms of their spending power, he claims that the economists who point out those costs fail to see commensurate benefits.

“The basic premise,” he writes, “is that domestic production has value beyond what markets reflect.”

The consumer who prefers paying $1 for a widget made in China to paying $2 for a widget made in the US, he correctly argues, “will probably not consider the broader importance of making things in America.”

Question: Why SHOULD that consumer consider that “broader importance?”

Well, says Cass, not doing so creates negative externalities — indirect costs to uninvolved third parties.

Which is where his argument falls apart, because the supposed externalities he describes either don’t exist or are net positive externalities to any version of “America” where broad freedom and prosperity are considered more valuable than the warm feeling one gets from indulging the authoritarian fantasies of Oren Cass.

Cass’s claimed externalities fall into three main, interrelated categories: “National security,” innovation, and supply chain resilience.

The solution to all three of these supposed “problems,” if they actually exist, is … freer trade.

Protectionism increases the likelihood of war, while freer trade decreases that likelihood. As Otto Mallery put it, “if soldiers are not to cross international boundaries on missions of war, goods must cross them on missions of peace.”

Innovation is no respecter of national borders. If someone has a good idea, that idea will make its way around the world and enjoy adoption everywhere. Yes, even in countries where people and governments fall for Cass’s siren song of economic insanity — just more slowly and less profitably, because Cass-style “protection” is itself a massive negative externality.

Tariffs fray supply chains, while free trade — and freer trade’s “peace dividend,” a reduced need for military spending in the name of “national security” — incentivizes building the most robust and efficient supply chains possible.

Cass’s real argument for protectionism is that freer trade thwarts his fantasy of a “national greatness”  powered by his terrible economics and our obedience. That argument is indeed correct.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter:@thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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