Dull Geek: Russ is wrong on rights

Thursday, September 22, 2005

Russ is wrong on rights

I don't know squat about economics. Especially not in comparison to someone like Russ Roberts, who's an econ professor at GMU. But I think he got this wrong in his latest entry on gouging:

By what right (asks the critic) can a gas station owner or the oil company charge so much more?

Right has nothing to do with it.

Whoops. I think right has everything to do with it. Property rights are what permit the gas station owner, or the oil company to charge whatever price that they want. Imagine I had a cherished family heirloom. I'm not willing to sell it except for ridiculous sums of money. Am I gouging? No, I'm exercising my property rights. So are the gas stations and oil companies.

Until you pay a mutually agreed price, it's not your gas. You have no right to it.

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Quote of the Moment

The United States Code -- containing federal statutory law -- is more than 50,000 pages long and comprises 40 volumes. The Code of Federal Regulations, which indexes administrative rules, is 161,117pages long and composes 226 volumes.

No one on Earth understands them all, and the potential interaction among all the different rules would choke a supercomputer. This means, of course, that when Congress changes the law, it not only can't be aware of all the real-world complications it's producing, it can't even understand the legal and regulatory implications of what it's doing.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds