Cafe Hayek - Latest Comments in Hawaii comes to its senses

Re: Hawaii comes to its senses

xteve — Wed, 10 May 2006 14:47:38 -0000

Yeah, but they're bound to get it right next time.

Re: Hawaii comes to its senses

Kevin — Tue, 09 May 2006 18:14:28 -0000

What's funny is the idiot Hawaiian politicians couldn't even get price-capping right. They capped the wholesale price but not the retail price. That's smart: squeeze the supply chain to make supply scarce, and then allow the retailers to charge whatever they want for the reduced supply.

I don't think you could come up with a better formula for MAXIMIZING prices. Producers usually have to engage in illegal collusion to pull that off!

Morons.

Re: Hawaii comes to its senses

Christopher Meisenzahl — Tue, 09 May 2006 14:44:59 -0000

Don't worry, someone will try it again. ;-)

Re: Hawaii comes to its senses

liberty — Tue, 09 May 2006 14:21:04 -0000

>I can not understand why anybody would have though the results would have been any different in the crony capitalist system that dominates the oil business.

Right, it works much better when the price setting is done by good honest representatives of the proletariat; such as in the USSR.

Re: Hawaii comes to its senses

spencer — Tue, 09 May 2006 13:38:00 -0000

I guess I'm too much of a cynic. When I first heard about this I saw that there were two refiners in Hawaii and assumed that they and their lobyiest would get together with the politicians and cut a deal where the politicians would write legislation for price setting that would not be significantly different from what the duoploly suppliers had been using for years.

As far as I can tell I have seen nothing to disprove my original analysis that the price controls would not make any difference except maybe to allow the refiners to be more profitable. Don't most academic economist teach in their introductory economics clasess that firms almost always capture the regulators?

I can not understand why anybody would have though the results would have been any different in the crony capitalist system that dominates the oil business.

Re: Hawaii comes to its senses

Ammonium — Tue, 09 May 2006 09:18:21 -0000

But I thought Hawaii's price controls were a success!?! Obviously these politicians are getting paid off by oil companies.

Re: Hawaii comes to its senses

John Dewey — Tue, 09 May 2006 08:52:42 -0000

I'm amazed that politicians stupid enough to implement price controls would be smart enough to remove those controls after only eight months.