(Alternate subject heading: “I’ll be taking these Huggies and whatever cash you got.”)

In DC Comics’ new 52 #8 (or “52 Week 8” or however you want to refer to it), a shopkeeper in Star City emerges from his store yelling, “Stop! Thief!” The thief is running ahead of him with an armful of groceries and a dozen disposable diapers. Suddenly the grocer has a bolo arrow binding his feet. Explaining his actions to Ralph Dibny, Green Arrow says, “He said, ‘Stop, Thief.’ I aimed for the guy charging thirty bucks for disposable diapers in a disaster zone.” Star City, as you probably know, was devastated by bombings two months earlier and is a disaster area short on supplies… and concerned citizen Oliver “Green Arrow” Queen is going to become the city’s mayor at some point in the “next 10 months” of 52.

Now, Green Arrow is acting pretty much in character here, so even though I find this objectionable, it’s true to his being a hopeless bleeding heart leftover. One might even find it in keeping with the common ideal of Robin Hood “robbing the rich and giving to the poor”, though this just shows a lack of understanding of Robin Hood who was against oppressive taxation in a monarchy where the poor had no recourse.

Of course, if Green Arrow is so sure that ‘profiteers’ are thieves and it’s okay for the shoplifter to escape, why hasn’t he actively bound the grocer and invited everyone in the area to take all the man has? Green Arrow seems to think that it’s acceptable for the shopkeeper to have his possessions taken away. Again, it’s actually fine that Green Arrow has an incoherent philosophy that he doesn’t think through, or he wouldn’t be the Oliver Queen we know and love.

My big problem with this is: Does the writer (whomever he may be…Johns, Waid, Morrison or Rucka…for this page of the story) understand why this is wrong? Is this scene perpetuating a bias against “price gouging” which in turn actually damages the poor of our society? This misunderstanding of the profit motive has real-world consequences and it hurts real people.

Before you think I’m making too much of this, read on.

Green Arrow can send two messages to the world outside Star City. They are:

A) If you bring in merchandise, you will make a profit because there is a high demand right now. Please bring in diapers and groceries and you can make more money than you can selling them in your area where they are plentiful.

B) If you bring in merchandise, you will have them taken away from you and vigilantes will brutalise you because of your higher-than-usual prices.

If a person can sell diapers for $30, I’d grab as many diapers as I could, drive to Star City and sell them for $29. So would everyone else who heard of this chance to make a profit, and they’d undercut me and the other guy, and we’d have to lower our prices to compete. In short order, Star City would be so overrun with diaper sellers that prices would be back to almost-normal. This same principle could go into effect for bottled water, milk, etc.

Now, to take those essentials to Star City, I would have to ask for more than the prices would normally be. After all, prices are normally low because there’s a set distribution system in place which is optimized to bring in items for as low a cost as possible. My throwing Pampers I bought at full price in a store into my Saturn and driving them to Star City with gas costing $3 a gallon (and probably higher if I had to refill in the disaster area) means that I have to ask a lot more than the standard price for Pampers just to break even.

But if I heard that merchants trying to sell needed goods in Star City were being stolen from, or harrassed as “price gougers”, it wouldn’t really be an enticing prospect. I have to go to all that trouble and expense only to be robbed when I get there? Most wouldn’t go…and those that DO go will be asking even more for Pampers because there’s so little competition and the demand is far greater.

IF, out of the goodness of my heart, I went to all the trouble to go and then sold the Pampers at their usual price, or even at cost, what would happen? Someone would buy my entire inventory immediately, then turn around and re-sell them for $30. It makes perfect sense to raise the prices on goods to the amount that people are still willing to pay. If I ask too much, I won’t get any takers and the price will go down. In the 52 story, that store owner must have had enough people willing to pay $30 for Huggies or he wouldn’t be selling them at that price.

The profit motive, if allowed to work unhindered in a capitalistic society, will bring needed items into an emergency area ASAP.

As I said, there are real world consequences to this failure to understand why prices can be high during an emergency situation. Just ask John Sheperson, who lost out big time because of an anti-gouging politician:

John Sheperson is a hero. When Hurricane Katrina struck, he turned on the news and learned that people in Mississippi had lost electric power. They desperately needed generators. He decided to help them, while helping himself.

He borrowed money, bought 19 generators, rented a U-Haul and drove it 600 miles to Mississippi, where he offered to sell the generators for twice what he paid for them. Eager buyers surrounded his truck. “People were excited,” he said.

So did the generators go to hospitals? To nursing homes? Did they save lives? Did Mississippi officials give Sheperson a medal?

Nope. Instead, they locked him up — and his generators, too.

“Nobody got any use out of them,” said Sheperson.

After Katrina, Jim Hood, Mississippi’s attorney general, launched a crusade against “price gouging.” “For people to take advantage of those in need,” he said, “violates every biblical standard of morals that I’m aware of.”

If Sheperson had been able to make his huge profit from generators, he may have instantly made another run and brought in another 20. And another 20, as fast as he could. Meanwhile, word would have spread about the opportunity for generator sales and others would have done so, until everyone who needed one had one and the prices returned to normal range. Instead, people in Mississippi who wanted generators couldn’t get them but Jim Hood got to think of himself as noble and good.

That’s right. Actual people actually hurt by the lack of resources available, all because our society doesn’t understand Basic Economics and instead castigates “gougers.” When the next hurricane comes, unless something is done to change the way we see the sellers of essential goods and services when they raise prices, there will be more grandstanding by politicians and more desperate people who are deprived of the goods they require. That’s why I can’t just let this go unchallenged.

Oliver Queen thinks he’s helping, but he’s not…and he’s set the precedent that Green Arrow helps thieves and endorses stealing if you feel you need to. That may be perfectly in keeping with the viewpoint of the Green Arrow character, but the readers of DC Comics need to be hearing this other message.

Oh yeah. Queen’s going to make a GREAT mayor for Star City. At least the economic ignorance of a politician in a comic book is just holding the mirror up to real life politicians like Jim Hood.

---

If you’d like to read more about the fallacies of “price gouging,” the Library of Monitor Duty recommends the following:
Thomas Sowell on post-hurricane “price gouging” in Florida.
Thomas Sowell on oil shortages and “gouging”
Buy Thomas Sowell’s “Basic Economics” which explains economics in simple terms so that the layman, a comic book writer, maybe even a politician can understand them. Or try his “Applied Economics”.