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Pouring Gasoline on the Fire of High Fuel Prices As
I type, the average price for a gallon of gasoline here in western Fortunately,
consumers here are getting a little relief from the high gas prices
courtesy of the Giant Eagle supermarket chain, which also owns a chain
of gas stations known as GetGo. Giant
Eagle offers its customers a discount of 10 cents per gallon of gas for
every $50 they spend on products in its supermarkets.
Furthermore, these coupons can be combined, so that someone who
has spent $500 in Giant Eagle stores can buy gas at GetGo for $1 less
than the price at the pump. Unfortunately,
however, GetGo’s competitors are not too happy with this turn of
events, seeing as how it inevitably takes business away from them.
Being good Americans, they know that the best way to deal with
such a situation is not to attempt to compete in the marketplace but to
enlist the government to destroy their competitor’s advantage.
Thus we find that they
have taken their case to the Pennsylvania state attorney general in
order to convince him to prosecute Giant Eagle under the Unfair Sales
Act of 1941, which prohibits retailers from selling merchandise “at
cost or less than cost in order to attract patronage.” Now
this puts the attorney general, Tom Corbett, in a sticky situation.
He’s a politician who depends on both campaign contributions
from special interests and votes from the general public to remain in
office. He will have to
weigh the importance of losing contributions from the Petroleum
Retailers and Auto Repair Association of Pittsburgh, who are bringing
the case to him and have a very strong incentive to back his opponent in
the next election should he fail to prosecute, against the importance of
losing votes to consumers, who will not much care for his costing them
more money at the pump should he successfully prosecute the case.
Since he was just elected and has three more years until the next
election, by which time oil prices may have fallen and consumers will,
in any event, likely have forgotten his raid on their pocketbooks, I
suggest that he will choose to prosecute.
The special interests have longer and stronger memories than do
the voters at large. Note
that I did not even consider the possibility that Corbett would actually
consider the merits of the case and the law under which the Petroleum
Retailers want him to prosecute GetGo.
Politicians seldom, if ever, consider such things.
As far as they are concerned, they make
laws; they don’t just codify the “laws of nature and of nature’s
God.” Therefore, their
laws are not to be questioned. They
are there to be used in whatever way benefits the politicians and keeps
the campaign contributions and votes rolling in. I,
on the other hand, am not a politician, so I will indeed consider the
merits of the case and the law under which the Petroleum Retailers want
the state to prosecute GetGo. The
Unfair Sales Act—which is similar to laws in over 30 other states, one
of which (Oklahoma’s) was used to prosecute Sam’s Club for a similar
“offense” of selling gasoline below cost, to the everlasting
benefit of Oklahoma drivers, all of whom now have to pay higher prices
for gas—is a blatant violation of the right to private property.
Simply put, if the party of the first part owns a piece of
property, be it gasoline, house paint, butter, or a girdle, he has every
right to offer it for sale at whatever price he so chooses; and the
party of the second part, the consumer, has every right to choose
whether to pay the price, negotiate it down to an acceptable price, or
reject it out of hand. It’s
called freedom, boys and
girls. When
the government comes along and tells a property owner that he may not
sell his property at a price agreeable to both him and his customers,
then that government is violating the property owner’s right to his
property (in effect, stealing it from him) and both the seller’s and
buyer’s rights to liberty (in effect, enslaving them to someone
else’s idea of what the price for the merchandise ought to be).
There are no ifs, ands, or buts about it.
All laws that interfere with free trade, whether within a
jurisdiction or between jurisdictions, are ipso
facto violations of the buyer’s and seller’s rights to liberty
and property, and as such are crimes in themselves and ought to be
repealed or, failing that, ignored. “I
can honestly say I am astonished at the reaction of the other gasoline
suppliers” to the GetGo discount program, wrote
one Pittsburgh Tribune-Review
reader to that newspaper’s editor.
Why should he be astonished in the least?
Isn’t this the American way? Let’s
face it: Most of the people
currently complaining about the Petroleum Retailers’ attempts to force
them to pay higher prices for gas will be writing angry letters to the
editor demanding government action if the price of gas rises to, say, $3
a gallon. Similarly, many of
them complain incessantly about Wal-Mart’s “unfair” advantages
over local retailers, who often go out of business when Wal-Mart sets up
shop in a community. Most of
them probably believe the myth that Teddy Roosevelt’s trust-busting
saved Americans from the evil Standard Oil monopoly—you know, the
one that kept steadily bringing the cost of refined oil products down as
it grew bigger and bigger. It
all depends on whose octane is being gored. No
one should be astonished that some people use government to obtain by
force what they cannot obtain by peaceful exchange.
This is, after all, the central function of government.
By its very nature it takes the lives, liberty, and property of
its citizens and puts them to its own uses, either to enrich the
government and its functionaries directly or to reward those who
contribute cash and/or votes to keep the same people in charge year
after year. No matter how
“limited” a government is, it invariably rests on force or the
threat of force and subsists by, at the very least, taking the property
of some or all of its citizens in the form of taxes and giving it to
other people. The only
astonishing thing is that it lets us have any freedom at all. A
principled attorney general would say, “The Unfair Sales Act violates
people’s rights to liberty and property and thus violates the laws of
nature and of God. I cannot
in good conscience enforce such a law.
Therefore, I am doing two things.
First, I am declining to prosecute Giant Eagle under this act.
Second, I am recommending to the state legislature that the act
be repealed.” Time will
tell whether or not Meanwhile,
it is the task of all lovers of liberty to work to abolish such
horrendous laws and to prevent further such laws from being enacted and
existing ones from being enforced. If
we can do that, we’ll have a good start on getting rid of the
institution that enacted them in the first place. Gentlemen,
start your engines—with discounted gasoline, of course. |
