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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TimF who wrote (321660)	1/18/2007 7:57:13 PM
From: combjelly	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1574680

"What already happens (with price controls) is that we often have shortages of things like gasoline, ice, generators, etc" Not really. In the immediate aftermath? Yes. But once the roads are cleared, that changes. Which is why things like FEMA without the cronyism is so important. "Meanwhile there are often massive quantities available outside the effected area, but there isn't enough incentive to move them." That is where you diverge from reality. The goods move in as soon as they can. The number of people who say "yeah, I have the stuff in my warehouse. But I don't feel like selling it unless they pay me well above market rate". I think a big part of the problem is that you don't know how retail businesses operate. It isn't a network of disconnected mom and pops. There is a distribution network of warehouses out there. Local businesses order out of those warehouses, whether they are part of a chain or not. If part of a chain, they will likely have warehouses of their own, but they may not either. Stores like Walmart put in orders every night and they are delivered every morning. So it is a matter of a warehouse getting an order and filling it. If they run out of an item, they get overflowed to another warehouse. And so on. The only way things could work like you describe is if the whole system got disrupted somehow. And that would take something like a full scale nuclear attack. In which case, there would be bigger problems than anti-profiteering laws.