[Morrigoon]

You know, every time there's a major landslide, or hurricane, or other disaster that takes out (usually rich) people's homes, people complain, saying "why should we help them rebuild when it's so obviously a place people shouldn't live?

Likewise, if the water was unpotable in a certain area, and permanently so, such that a temporary influx of clean water would not be enough to sustain it, then people would either pay what it cost to get water in there, or they would move. And under that logic, they ought to.

I'm not saying gougeing doesn't happen... just that there is economic justification for the behavior, and in order to control prices, you'd have to give pretty good justification why the company doesn't have a right to make as much money as demand will allow.

One good justification would be that without clean water, we'll die. Will we die without gasoline? Not necessarily... we'll just be royally inconvenienced (I know current gas prices inconvenience ME!)

And yet, with all these complaints of pricing, does anyone ever discuss the possibility of getting the government to lighten up on its share of the price problem? NO.

People love to talk about price controls as some sort of utopian rule. Look, price controls only work in this country for the same reason that companies do business with Wal-Mart: we're too big a customer to ignore. Guess what... there are other customers who are growing in importance now. If we go to far controlling things, we'll find companies preferring to do business elsewhere. It may surprise folks to discover that there are places in this world where you cannot automatically expect things to be availible, regardless of your willingness to pay for it. If the profit margins sink too low, supply will just shift to places where they aren't. Companies will always act in their best financial interest, even if that means only doing business abroad.

This same principle applies to why companies keep leaving California and the US. The more we do to control their employment practices, the more sense it makes for them to move their operations abroad. Everything we do to "help" the American worker must be weighed against the possibility that it will end up hurting the American worker because the regulations make it more profitable to do business elsewhere.

Getting back on topic... if California, for example, decides that gas companies are gougeing and put price controls on fuel, those gas companies will prefer to sell gas to all the other states. Taking this to an extreme... why would they sell gas at a $0.02 profit in CA when they could sell it for $1.00 profit in, say, Nevada? So they will sell as much as they possibly can in Nevada, Colorado, Oregon, Washington, Idaho and Utah, and then, if there's anything left, they *might* sell it to California. Imagine how fun a fuel shortage would be!