Few examples exist of greater disagreement between the public and economists than the one over laws outlawing "price gouging" (a term I put in quotation marks, along with "price
gougers," because I consider both to be emotionally loaded and misleading, as I explain later in this essay).
I have seen price
gougers asking as much as $75--$100 for a 500-round brick of ammo at area gun shows.
(45.) "After Fran, Cleanup Starts; City Targets Price
Gougers," Wilmington Morning Star, September 8, 1996.
The editor states that some people compare ticket scalpers to "payday loan sharks and gasoline
gougers." We would agree.
The soaring cost of living was worsened by the activities of people the Daily News castigated as 'profiteers' and 'price
gougers'--traders who hoarded basic foodstuffs to force up prices.
(58)
Gougers, therefore, pervert the marketplace by raising the price of goods not in response to changing market equilibriums, but rather based on a desire to accumulate profit, which some politicians find reaches a level of offensiveness that warrants regulation.
My date was presented with a pea and crab terrine, with crab
gougers. Again, it was a colourful feast for the eyes as well as the tongue.
These are the prices that politicians are most likely to prevent from rising to their market-clearing levels with price ceilings (or threats against price "
gougers") when they increase rapidly because of a sudden increase in demand or interruption in supply.
"Of
gougers fierce the eyes that pierce the fiercest
gouger he." --The City of the Saints Richard Francis Burton.
Hand drums were hourglass-shaped and made from immature tree trunks hollowed out with the use of embers and
gougers. Their distal ends were decorated with carved and painted designs and their tympana made of lizard skin tuned with wax knobs.
Inflation and high levels of engagement of the state in saving capitalism has raised mass discontent from a local protest against local price
gougers and profiteers to a national political protest against a class biased state, which ignores deteriorating living standards and concerns itself only with the very rich.
As the scalpers and
gougers see it, they simply are charging whatever the market will bear.
