For a certain sort, impending natural disasters — like, say, hurricanes — are the perfect time to lecture everyone about the evils of price gouging laws. The Federalist, Cato, and Reason all have articles in this vein; you can also find them in publications like Investor’s Business Daily or Harvard Business Review. And Hurricane Florence, at the time of this writing, has just made landfall on the North Carolina coast, so it seems fitting for the Libertarian opinion writer for The Nevada Independent to join the fray.

As I’ve said previously, markets are simply a means of communicating information — and I loathe vulgar libertarianism. Just because a market transaction happens doesn’t make it good or right. Products produced by governments employing forced labor, for example, don’t magically become the product of voluntary free enterprise just because a cash register is involved. Prices spiking by an order of magnitude or more might be the product of voluntary actions and transactions, but they might not be — either way, it’s not an outcome anyone wants and that we should therefore avoid if we can. Additionally, markets aren’t the only means of communicating information. (If they were, you’d be paying us to read this article.)

Disasters, whether they’re natural or man-made, do two things: shrink the supply of basic necessities while simultaneously increasing the demand for them. Roads that ordinarily support two-way transportation of goods and services might be closed or restricted to one-way traffic to facilitate an evacuation. Families, meanwhile, aren’t just thinking about what they’ll have for dinner tonight and shopping accordingly. They, and their thousands or millions of neighbors, are trying to get enough to eat and drink for the duration of the disaster until normal levels of supply resume. The result is scarcity — so how can we manage it?

When facing a condition of scarcity, there are three options available to us: We can allocate goods based on who has the most money. We can allocate goods based on who has the most time. Or we can allocate goods politically.

Let the market decide?

Markets are, as previously stated, a means of communicating information. Higher prices are a piece of information that tell consumers supplies are limited, so they should only buy what they can afford. Higher prices also tell suppliers that, if possible, greater supply should be delivered. People who make money off the consumption of a particular good, like gasoline (building contractors, for example) are more likely to outbid people who view that good as a consumption good. The result is a more efficient allocation of capital, one that privileges those who will produce more capital over those who will merely consume it, which results in greater capital and, hopefully, greater prosperity for all.

That’s the theory, anyway. In practice, supplies sometimes can’t be increased, no matter what price signals are thrown at them. Sometimes that’s because increasing supply is impossible at any price; sometimes that’s because increasing supply is more undesirable than the alternative. If you’re trying to evacuate a neighborhood before a hurricane, for example, you don’t want to have to evacuate more tanker truck drivers than you absolutely must, and you definitely don’t want them to get stuck in the disaster zone. Additionally, you want evacuees to spend as little time at their neighborhood gas station as necessary — the workers in that gas station need to be evacuated, too, after all.

What oftentimes happens, then, during emergency disaster situations, is runaway price inflation and speculation. A case of water that might ordinarily sell for less than $5, for example, is suddenly priced at $42 at a place that doesn’t ordinarily sell cases of water. On its face, in a generic market scenario, this might seem like a win — after all, a place that doesn’t ordinarily sell cases of water is now selling water, which means the supply of water is increasing, right?

Not in a disaster scenario. If supplies are fixed and no new supplies can enter the disaster zone, what might be (and probably is) happening is the $42 case of water has been bought several times over the course of the disaster by people hoping to make some money off of that scarce case of water. At no point does that case of water actually go to a family, or families, in need. Worse yet, those most in need are frequently the poorest and the least able to afford the increasingly expensive necessities available on the market.

Unsurprisingly, this approach isn’t politically popular — which is why some states, though not Nevada, have price gouging laws.

Let the lines decide?

Politically, for the reasons shown above, price gouging laws are incredibly popular. They let politicians tell their constituents they’re doing something without actually doing anything to increase supplies to those in need. Trouble is, goods are still scarce during a natural disaster. There’s still only so much food and fuel around. Only now, instead of these goods going to those with the most money, they’re going to those with the most time — those with the time to go to the store, load their shopping cart with as much of everything as they can possibly afford, and stand in long lines will have the supplies they need to outlast the emergency. Those without the time, or who are just unfortunate enough to get to the store or the gas station too late, will not.

Why does this happen? Price gouging laws force the market to not communicate a vital piece of information, one which people in the disaster area have already communicated to themselves through other means: Goods are about to be scarce. So, people react accordingly.

That people know a disaster is coming despite the market communicating it, however, tells us something important. Markets are a very useful way of communicating information, but they’re not the only way.

Let the bureaucrats decide?

If the market isn’t communicating the information needed to ensure everyone has as much access to food, clean water, and shelter as possible, there is another option. We could use the political process — the one that, in principle, allows us to communicate our needs to the community and offers the community the opportunity to meet those needs. In principle, politicians are already accustomed to listening to their constituents. If we apply that same principle but scale it out through a sufficiently large layer of administration and bureaucracy that can collate the needs and capabilities of everyone in the community, we might be able to meet everyone’s needs.

This would take political courage. Politicians would have to be able to say ‘no’ when their constituents demand that they meet their wants as well as their needs — but, if the rescue effort was conducted competently, the politicians responsible would be rewarded handsomely and re-elected.

Don’t laugh. It’s worked before.

In 1948, immediately after World War II, Soviet military forces blocked road, rail, and canal access to what would eventually become West Berlin — the half of Berlin occupied by American, British and French forces. The only way in or out was through three 20-mile wide pre-arranged air corridors through Soviet-occupied East Germany. Meanwhile, West Berlin only had a little more than a month’s worth of food and coal.

A small team of experts asked some basic questions: How many airplanes can fly at a time in the corridors? How much food and fuel can each aircraft carry? Would that be enough to feed and warm the people of West Berlin? They did the math — it would take 5,000 tons a day — then got to work. By the second week of the blockade, 1,000 tons per day were flown in. Then, flight paths were streamlined and simplified. Planes were standardized according to ease of unloading and cargo size. Maintenance schedules were standardized and strictly adhered to in order to minimize downtime. Just two months after the blockade began, the Berlin Airlift delivered over 4,500 tons of cargo using more than 1,500 flights per day — enough to keep the people of West Berlin fed and warm, if not particularly comfortable. Less than a year later, nearly 9,000 tons per day were being delivered using newly built airport runways and improved cargo hauling procedures.

How was this possible? Did the free market decide that West Berlin was worth saving? Did the market tell the U.S. Air Force how many cargo planes to deploy based on the logic of profit and capital accumulation? Of course not.

So what happened?

Information about the importance of West Berlin was communicated politically, both from Allied capitals to their air forces and from the Germans to the troops in West Berlin and back to the Allied capitals. Then, accurate information regarding the situation in West Berlin was communicated to those that could do something about it, who then decided, using facts and figures, what could be done about it. This was done the old-fashioned way — through manual counts, reports, and educated guesswork.

Next, experts with logistical experience were put in the right places at the right times to ensure that goods were delivered as quickly and efficiently as possible. Then, experienced locals were hired — yes, even ex-Luftwaffe ground crews — to ensure necessary unloading and airport construction was completed. Inside Berlin, strict rationing was put into place. It didn’t matter how much money you had or how long you stood in line, you get the same amount of food and fuel as everyone else. Finally, it took planeloads full of money — $350 million in 1949 dollars (roughly $3.7 billion today), plus £17 million (roughly £580 million today, or $760 million), plus 150 million Deutschmarks (at a DM 4.2:$1 rate, this works out to $35.7 million in 1949 dollars, or roughly $380 million), for a grand total, in today’s money, of just under $5 billion over the course of the year-long blockade. To put that into perspective, the state of Nevada’s budget this coming biennium is expected to be just over $8.5 billion, not including nearly $4.5 billion in federal funds.

This worked for a number of reasons. The mission was easy to understand and achievable: Feed the West Berliners. Those responsible for carrying out the mission agreed on the goals of the mission and, crucially, had the capacity and capability to carry it out. Those responsible for living under the Airlift voluntarily agreed to abide by the rationing scheme and, in the middle of the Airlift, even elected a supportive city parliament to carry it out. Everyone involved voluntarily, using their governments as agents of organization and coordination, worked to ensure the success of the Airlift and the relief effort. They trusted each other and they trusted the institutions they relied upon to get the work done.

This brings us back to the here and now. Given modern advances in logistics and information technology, surely modern experts in positions of authority and responsibility could easily exceed the work of our forebears. Feeding West Berlin for a year using propeller planes and early radar is surely harder than, say, evacuating coastal North Carolina and cleaning up the following week.

Just one problem: We don’t trust them. Nor, frankly, should we.

It’s true that bureaucrats and government workers kept West Berlin fed and supplied for a year using facts, logic, and reason. It’s also true that bureaucrats and government workers — and I’m going to be charitable and stick to just this country — forcibly sterilized more than 60,000 Americans, jammed freeway overpasses into black neighborhoods, turned Owens Lake into the nation’s worst source of air pollution, put radioactive material in our milk, and pretended to treat black syphilis patients. And that’s just for starters.

The political process can produce good outcomes from time to time, it’s true, but when it doesn’t, and it frequently doesn’t, people — thousands, if not millions of people — may die. After enduring the effects of generations of bureaucrats empowered with increasingly effective means of doing appalling amounts of damage to those in their path, the political process, shall we say, communicated, and we want no more of that. That’s why we now have so many veto points — environmental reviews, community advisory boards, and so on — where we can tell the government to stop, hopefully before it hurts someone again. That’s also why it’s so expensive for our government to do anything, and why it takes so long for it to get done.

It’s also why many of our modern logistics experts work for Wal-Mart and Waffle House, not in Washington, D.C., and why we increasingly look to the likes of them, not the government, when a crisis strikes. They get things wrong, too, but with less power comes less responsibility. A bad batch of hash toppings might spark a food poisoning outbreak, but that’s less tragic than what happened in the Superdome after Hurricane Katrina.

Ultimately, price gouging laws aren’t evil because they inhibit the free market, though they certainly do that. They’re evil because they’re the product of political cowardice. They’re evil because they help people in power look like they’re “doing something” without actually taking the steps necessary to rebuild trust and meet the needs of their constituents during and after a disaster.

David Colborne has been active in the Libertarian Party for two decades. During that time, he has blogged intermittently on his personal blog, as well as the Libertarian Party of Nevada blog, and ran for office twice as a Libertarian candidate. He serves on the Executive Committee for both his state and county Libertarian Party chapters. He is the father of two sons and an IT professional. You can follow him on Twitter @ElectDavidC or email him at david.colborne@lpnevada.org.

The changing nature of the electricity customer

Defending truth, due process and the rule of law should outweigh partisan disagreement

For Trump’s Nevada pep squad, Yucca Mountain issue leaves a hole in the conversation

Price gouging, the free market and you

The energy choice we haven’t been talking about: A distributed grid

On affordable housing, Nevadans need to work together

One senator’s golden opportunity to stand against political toxicity

Stakes rising in Laborers Local 872 White’s political poker game

Vote yes on Questions 2 and 4

The truth about the coming state budget: Reports of a surplus have been greatly exaggerated

Questions for those with – or seeking – an “advice and consent” role in Judge Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing

Hof a symptom of Nevada GOP’s greater dysfunction in the time of Trump

Sisolak, Laxalt mine for votes at convention

Job security in the 21st century for young adults

Health impacts of carbon pollution and climate change

Priority number one

Nevada GOP suspects there’s a whole lot of Californi-catin’ going on

The price of carelessness and thoughtlessness

EN ESPAÑOL

@TheNVIndy ON TWITTER