Via Craig at MTPolitics comes word of a very, very stupid anti-“price gouging” and anti-“hoarding” law making its way through their legislature.
(3) If a person did not offer for sale an essential good or service, at retail or wholesale, within an affected area during the 30 days before the declaration of the state of emergency or the finding of an abnormal market disruption, it is a prima facie violation of subsection (1) to charge a price that represents a gross disparity from the price at which the good or service was readily obtainable in the affected area during the 30 days immediately before the declaration or finding.
Craig then makes up a very good hypothosies about a private individual who is able to go to Spokane, WA, outside the “affected area”, and buys a load of plywood to bring back to MT and sell at a price folks inside the “affected area” are willing to pay, but is above the market price before the emergency.
This increasing of the supply to make a small profit (you know, the American Way of Doing Things) would be considered “price-gouging”.
A commenter posting under the name “Walter Greenspan” then goes and does what any right thinking individual should: Remind folks that the term “Price-Gouging” is a political term and not an economic one. I’m pretty sure the folks who visit here know which side of the political spectrum to congratulate for making it up.
As for the hoarding part of the bill; it seems pretty straight forward towards the actual interfering with the delivery of staple products for your own use, although Craig did manage to find quite the hole in it rather quickly:
If I have, say, 100 gallons of water that I’ve stored from my own well, in my own containers, is that hoarding an essential good?
If I have an above-ground diesel tank (as many farmers do), would it be considered hoarding if they didn’t make it available for sale? Hell, I know a guy who has a diesel genny that he keeps stocked with a month’s worth of fuel. What about him? Will he be punished for being prepared?
If I have a couple of spare bedrooms, and rent them out, does that constitute price-gouging, since I didn’t offer the service 30 days prior? Just to be safe, I don’t think I’ll let anyone stay at my home, and ask them to defray the cost of my preparedness.
Exactly. All this bill would do for those informed about it would be to stop one from helping their fellow man. Likewise, the overly litigeous who get helped by those uninformed about this law, could sue/threaten to turn the helpful in to the police.
Imagine that! Government making the helpful, criminal.
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In other Montana Politics, Joe at the View from North Central Idaho reads this in the NRA News:
Montana’s Castle Doctrine bill also contains a provision stating that if companies forbid employees from legally and lawfully carrying a firearm, and an employee is a victim of a crime, then the employee can sue his or her employer for failing to protect him (or refusing to allow him to protect himself).
From one employee of a gun-bigot General Manager to everyone else who is probably in the same boat: Vewy Kuul!
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Speaking of Joe; If you visit his place regularly, you know that you quite often get to see some of the interesting things that he finds in his referer logs.
Ben at The Reasonable Nut did the same the other day and found someone at the Neu Jersey US Customs office stopping by his place.
Ben is a very straightforward guy and his response to the visitor is exactly correct.
How the f*** are we supposed to know when it’s 30 days prior to an emergency? Isn’t it the very nature of an emergency to not be scheduled? Are the libs going to demand calendar makers now mark 30 days before every hurricane, tsunami, earthquake, ice storm, major rainstorm, etc other natural disasters so that we know when we have to stop buying personal emergency supplies?
I bought an assortment of long-term snack foods and a case of water to store at my workplace in case of emergencies. According to the
Commiesliberals, now I’m not only exploiting the workers, but I’m hoarding supplies.DFWMTX, if your habit is to have these things on hand, you haven’t broken this idiotic law, because it has become your custom to do so, and as I read the bill, it specifically looks at prior custom for individual actions.
That said, the bill sucks, because it will do NOTHING to further preparedness. All it does is try to sort out the politics of the aftermath of a disaster.
And both of you overlooked the most valuable commodity of all – Ammunition. If DFWMTX’s take WERE to become the accepted one, if you have, say, six times the stock of ammunition as everyoe else (I probably have 10-20 times as much according to MY local standards), you could be accused of hoarding ammo. Now, if it was somewhere else but MT, I would suspect that the antigun crowd would jump all over that interpretation and try to morph it into an “Arsenal Law”, but gun laws historically don’t do well in MT, and neither do their progenitors.
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I would advise EVERY reader of this post to do one of two things about your referrer stats: Either blog and forget that they exist, or stop blogging if who reads your screed scares you.
I’ve said it before: If you’re a gunblogger, or probably even contribute by comment to gun blogs, someone has put your name on a list. I have, fer Christ’s Sake, and I read my gunblogger list first every day. If you are worried about what you write, DON’T WRITE IT. IN FACT, GET OUT OF BLOGGING, BECAUSE THE WORRY WILL KILL YOU LONG BEFORE THE AGENTS OF THE BATFE.
When and if the BATFE or any other agency comes knocking at my door, and especially if they come knocking my door down, I will have an appropriate response, which I have rehearsed so that I may get it right the first time. That training done, I don’t worry. If I was like that AR guy Fincher, and made M1919 Browning LMGs in my basement, I might be more worried, but I don’t, in fact, ALL of my weapons are in factory configuration.
Mark this, and mark it well. The day you get worried about who is reading your blog is the day you have blogged exactly one day too long.
I just won’t tell the neighbors about my preparations, if somthing happens, I won’t let on that I’m using anything, and won’t share, which is probably not the result this “legislator” intended.
And the anti-hoarding concept, that was also something Lenin and Co invented to increase their control over the population after their coup.