Price Gouging

Price gouging most likely is a negative term for most people. The reasons are price gouging can be meant as unreasonable and unfair charging comparing to normal at the time when people really need it. In addition, it can be meant that business owner suddenly raising the prices and taking the advantage of the increase demand due to an emergency event. There are many arguments saying price gouging is moral, or amoral. However, if we base on the cause of price gouging, it is not about moral or amoral. Price gouging is all about the market demand and supply.

First, most people feel price gouging is amoral. The reason is because people need to pay a lot more for supplies; it is unfair and unreasonable for them. People argue that price gouging is amoral, that’s why there are anti-gouging laws in some countries. On other hand, there must be a reason of why price gouging occurs. In normal situation, there is no reason for a business to increase prices sharply. Businesses usually decrease the price instead of increase the price, because of the competition with other businesses. Price gouging mostly happen when only the demand increase such as after natural disasters, or before any storm.

Second, the disadvantage with the law of anti-gouging, it hurts the storm victims and makes their life harder. The anti-gouging laws, prices keeps low, people will buy as much as they can before the storm arrive. That will end up shortages on supplies, and the people who really need it as emergency will not able to get it. In this case, the anti-gouging law is not protecting consumers or controlling the prices, it is killing the victims.

Third, the benefit of price gouging is allows businesses to raise prices to meet the demand in order to eliminate the incidence of empty shelves before any storm. That way it can ensure there are supplies available for the people who really need. In some case, we can say that price gouging saves lives instead of taking advantage from consumers.

In...