The article about “why we need price gouging in times of crisis”, is some odd shit. I can assure you that there is plenty of water to go round, even if it isn’t as much as normal. Many people did buy ahead of time, however when you get 28 inches of water in 3 hours instead of 3 days and you have to leave your home, you are not carrying the case of water. So kindly fuck off with you random garbage articles, I disconnect with most ancaps when it comes to compassion. Do I believe we need laws, nope, but I believe we need compassion, and Joe Blow selling water for $42 is anything but compassionate. This is the very reason a lot of people do not believe an anarchist, free market, voluntary society can work. I am watching my neighbors who have never flooded be plucked from their homes in boats, losing their entire life, and I got to read that fucking trash. Kindly fuck off. Want to show the world anarchy can work, do like the countless people out lending a hand, donate a case of water, come help me cook for the shelter, and STFU.
This is precisely when people attack the price system, though, because people have the moral intuition that someone selling at higher-than-normal prices is doing something wicked and must be responsible for the price being that high, when they aren’t at all. The authorities interfering to stop local prices from being allowed to rise during a crisis is exactly why famines happened historically, it’s something that turns a localized temporary disaster into something worse. Price ceilings always create shortages, and that’s precisely what you don’t want in an emergency situation.
The choice isn’t between the guy selling water bottles for $42 or him giving them away, it’s between letting him sell them for $42 or not having water bottles there at all. Yeah, he isn’t being altruistic, but his greed is actually leading him to contribute to disaster relief efforts by showing up with water instead of staying home. You’re not being compassionate to disaster victims by telling those people to stay home if they’re not going to help for free, you’re taking away their opportunity to buy water that they apparently need badly enough they’re willing to pay $42 for it. The greedy asshole who was induced to drive from several states away with a truck full of water bottles just to try to make a quick buck is possibly making the difference between life and death for some people in need, even if he doesn’t have an ounce of compassion. The moral intuition you’ve got about price-gougers is backwards - that’s the important insight those articles are spreading, and this is exactly the time to spread it. If anti-gouging laws get passed after this hurricane, those guys won’t risk jail time to show up for the next one, and there will be a shortage where people can’t find drinkable water at any price. Trying to prevent that is beneficial as well.
Compassion is great, but one of anarchy’s greatest strengths is that it doesn’t actually require compassion to work, that people without any compassion in their hearts are still led by greed to work for the benefit of others anyway. A system that only works when people are eager to sacrifice their self-interest to serve others doesn’t work at all.
Okay, but “no price-gouging laws” isn’t incompatible with improved civil defense infrastructure, and calling it “anarchy” is stretching it. If the situation destabilized enough they’d call in the army, and there is still very much the risk of prosecution if you kill the man selling waters for $42 and take all of his waters, once the disaster clears.
Rebellion and break down in law & order in any area of the country undermines the authority of the state as the ruler and monopolizer of force and arbiter of law. Desperation is a key factor in breaking down law & order. Therefore, it would be prudent to create caches of limited, key supplies (such as clean water, water filters, and MREs) at various points in the country, cycling them out as donations to poverty organizations (or selling them) as they near expiration.
This serves both the internal (preventing looting, rioting, and loss of faith in the government) and external (decreasing the amount of death and dysfunction in the event of enemy attack) security primary functions of the state, and increases the scale of hazardous events required to bring down the government. Improvements in civil defense infrastructure also act as a multiplier on available military force as a credible threat for use in international politics.
