The price of nothing and the value of nothing

 

The price of nothing and the value of nothing

Cecil Graham: What is a cynic?
Lord Darlington: A man who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing.
Cecil Graham: And a sentimentalist, my dear Darlington, is a man who sees an absurd value in everything and doesn’t know the market price of any single thing.

― Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan

money as a Procustes bed conciliating all human desires and needs

Price is a mechanism optimising, for any level of total wealth, instantaneous localized optimal deployment of resources.

People don’t grasp that, and politicians oppose it. See "it’s unfair that masks cost 10 $ if the manufacturing price is 12c !!1!”, all the while disregarding (or hiding, in the unlikely event that they knew what they are talking about) all the assumptions underlying their words: that goods can be locally produced, with materials readily available or sourced locally, using plants and machinery already in place, with jigs premade for the purpose, using personnel not otherwise engaged but with similar productivity to faraway plants with years of operation under their belt.

I remember a small episode in a book, "Cheasepeake" by James Michener: a Sunday sailor gets stuck in the mud. He hails a fisherman passing by, who in  a few minutes frees the boat. When asked how much would he charge for the service, he says "50 bucks". The hapless amateur protests that in terms of work that wasn't worth ten. And the fisherman answers "ten bucks for the work. 40 for the fact I knew how to do it."

But, what do you know. one of the factors which is seldom priced correctly is time to end a task, and if Covid didn't teach citizens that governments are not exactly agog about preparedness, the Ukraine conflict so far did in spades. But back to the war on "exploiters".

In a market mechanism, scarcity begets wealth for those who bore the inventory risk, and glut afterwards. Within the group of those who bore that risk there are the smart and the lucky, the good and the bad. The only limits are legality…. And in these cases, allowing politicians to rule on pricing WITHOUT the necessary disclaimer of conflict of interest is not the path I like.

Yes, the same people who screamed at “profiteering” (and are currently doing it in other fields outside pandemic measures) are singularly well suited to get overrun by events that were not only quite present in forecasts by any single adult put to look at the problem, but are apt to do nothing about it. Politicians in general are snake oil sellers, and as such they have no interest in rare events, and even less in putting resources in preparing against them. They’ll be long dead by then, under the definition of "long dead" that political professionals use: the shortest time to any vote where their party is running.

However, Never in my adult life I have seen this extent of blatant price fixing on the part of governments who ostensibly always carry the “Price gouging !!1!” card close to their hearts.