The Practice of Price Gauging - Essay Example

Each of these ideas points to a different way of thinking about justice”. (Sandel 6) Advocates of price gauging laws promote the need for a third party (the government) to step in to ensure that practices such as these do not directly affect the consumer in a negative way. However, those that argue for freer markets such as Thomas Sowell merely state that such practice is a necessary action of a market that attempts to justify supply and demand in a crisis situation. In other words, these are prices that consumers are willing to pay to suppliers so an equilibrium is met within the markets.

This in effect boils down to a question of welfare versus freedom of the market/consumer and/or supplier. As such, arguments for regulation point to the fact that in times of a crisis or emergency there is no “free” market as individuals are forced to consume necessities such as lodging, food, and fuel and are at the mercy of suppliers who lord over them in an extortionary way. Furthermore, the brief write up grapples with the fact that our current economic system is dominated by greed; accordingly, it attempts to juxtapose this fact with the claim that greed is not in and of itself evil – yet too much greed is.

What is of interest to this particular author is the fact that from a free-market economic standpoint it is rational to allow the practice of price gouging to take place as it is merely a representation of dynamic supply and demand and the complex interplay between consumer and supplier with regards to what equilibrium they can agree to meet. However, when one realizes that the economic system under which our nation operates is quite a far cry from a truly free market.