It’s easy to blame others for greed. And when prices rise, I suppose I can imagine being so upset that … well, if not my mind, Bernie Sanders’ mind … would become unhinged:
“Greed. Greed. Greed. While Americans are struggling at the pump,” the senator tweeted on Friday the 13th, “in the first three months of this year, oil and gas companies made over $41 billion in profits, more than double their profits from last year. The problem is not inflation. The problem is corporate greed.”
That’s Bernie Sanders for you. It’s not government profligacy or Federal Reserve monetary policy or the Biden Administration’s anti-fossil fuels agenda … or supply-line problems, persisting COVID-lockdown effects, or anything else.
Just greed.
But is greed somehow cyclical? Why were greedy corporations providing cheap gas a year ago and then able to raise it only under Democrats’ rule?
Alas, Bernie isn’t the only low-brow demagogue in the Senate. There’s Senator Elizabeth Warren pushing a new “price gouging” bill.
So, just as Bernie never answers “why is greed so successful at gouging now?,” how does Liz answer the burning question “how can we objectively define ‘price-gouging’?”
As journalist Catherine Rampell observes on Twitter, the senator’s definition in the bill is less than enlightening: “price-gouging” is “just pricing that is ‘unconscionably excessive.’”
Now that, Senator Warren, is unconscionably vague.
And incidentally, aren’t both senators on the record as demanding higher gas prices to usher in “green energy” to “save the planet”? This all seems unconscionably … deceptive.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Photo credits: Warren/Bernie/money
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Necessarily,
M⋅ν = Σ(pₐ⋅qₐ)
where M is the amount of money used in transactions, ν is the average frequency with which a monetary unit changes hands, pₐ is the price of the a‑th commodity, and qₐ is the amount of that commodity traded per unit time.
If M is dramatically increased, ν doesn’t drop, and the various qₐ don’t rise, then prices in general must rise.
Most political officials knew quite well that recent, dramatic increases in M would result in price-inflation; these officials just played-dumb with the help of mainstream journalists.
Most officials now blaming general rises in prices on private greed are still playing dumb, albeit in a new way. And they have a loyal base who are very willing to play dumb along with them. Warren is playing dumb. I dunno ’bout Bernie though; he often seems truly stupid.
The MMT (“Modern” Monetary Theory) crowd insisted that the increases in M would summon new quantities of goods and services (qₐ) into existence; now that this claim has failed, some of them are insisting that the price-inflation caused the increases in M, even though that claim requires that effect came months before cause.