There's this weird feeling that somehow, even though he's gouging everyone who pays for insurance at best and just the sick at worst and after being found guilty of fraud we should still like him and because why? Because he's familiar with internet culture in the same way we are? Afterall, he may be a fraudster and a gouger but he's not so bad because he's also a troller! He may be a conman but he's our conman (and intelligent!)
You didn't really rebut at all, you just googled it and pasted a link here...
I think here even Sowell would agree that it exists. Basically price gouging can't exist if we use a simplified view of a perfectly competitive market. If we move over to a market with only one seller then we could probably define price gouging as when the monopoly firm charges a price higher (or much higher) than what we would see in a competitive equilibrium. AKA exactly what Shkreli did.
Is there such thing as a perfectly competitive market irl?
There's a canonical example used by the Mises Institute -- water after a hurricane. I watch a lecture half a decade ago. I don't have perfect information. Far from it. It was convincing. A stripped down model which made gouging look ridiculous. I think it's debatable.
>Is there such thing as a perfectly competitive market irl?
Wikipedia has the requirements for a perfectly competitive market, if you look at them you'll see that there certainly can't be many markets like that. I'd say the closest thing you're liable to run into on a day to day basis is gasoline. There's a lot of stations, you probably drive past a few everyday so you've got good price information, you know what the product will be and it's all the same.
>There's a canonical example used by the Mises Institute -- water after a hurricane. I watch a lecture half a decade ago. I don't have perfect information. Far from it. It was convincing. A stripped down model which made gouging look ridiculous. I think it's debatable.
One thing I find with libertarians (Mises tipped me off) is that they're often not too familiar with good critiques, only the surface level stuff that gets thrown around on twitter or tumblr. So here's my contribution:
