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Comment by threeseed | Hacker News Reader

Simple. People shouldn't profit from misery.

What does this mean, practically? Do doctors profit from misery? Are insurance companies inherently virtuous because they have to pay out for misery?

The price is reflective of an underlying economic reality. Banishing the price doesn't fix the reality. In fact, the reality could be fixed through the organic incentives created by not engaging in censorship.

Most services exist to ameliorate a want. That is to reduce misery. Your statement basically means people shouldn’t profit. But if they shouldn’t profit what incentive will they have to reduce misery? It seems clear to me that if anyone is guilty of profiting from misery it is doctors, whose high salaries are inexcusably tied to misery. Truly, they should donate their time and live in a tent outside the hospitals they work at, and accept only kitchen scraps for compensation.

Profit is good, if you are in the business of producing a good or distributing a good to the intended customer, that is, if you are a manufacturer or part of the normal retail chain.

Profit is not good, if your business is basically black marketing. That is, removing a product from its normal retail chain just so that you create a shortage and then sell with a profit due to the shortage created by you.

And with medical supplies, we need to make sure that all those, who are in desperate need, get the needed supplies.

Arms companies (aka defense contractors) profit from war, should they not exist? What about pharmaceutical companies that profit from sickness?

In practice it's more like they are expected not to profit excessively. See the $700 epipens & surrounding firestorm.

The two cases aren't really comparable. In the case of epipen, the price is high because manufacturer has a monopoly, and is using that monopoly to hike prices. With the masks, the prices are high purely because demand far outstrips supply. Those ebay sellers hardly have a monopoly, so I expect them to be priced close to the market clearing price, otherwise they'd be either be selling out (if below) or have zero sales (if above). In a perfect world, any profits would be redistributed back to society, but that's more of a taxation problem than a market one.

Huh?

I cannot think of a better thing that I would want people to profit from, than the act of reducing misery around the world.

The people who reduce misery are the ones most deserving of profits and reward.

Price gougers aren't trying to reduce misery; they increase it.

I wish this were true but instantly I think tobacco, alcohol and gambling. Also where do you draw the line? Should Walmart be able to charge so much to a struggling single mom who has to choose between eating herself and feeding her baby? There is no easy solutions to this but I ultimately think big corporations try and maximize their profits at any cost every single day and no one says Walmart or whoever sells these masks should sell them at cost.

What is the cost of a mask when the capacity of the existing factories is tapped out and (in principle) one more mask requires a new factory? It's fuzzy when that point comes exactly, but it kind of has to exist. If you want to say the cost of masks is exactly what current operations require, then that one mask must be millions and millions of dollars. So who pays for it?

They probably sell them at a low percentage markup and you can be sure there would be an uproar if they suddenly jacked up prices 5x.

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