I personally can't condemn scalpers, either you have free market or you don't. If my local gas station pays $3 a gallon for what's in the tanks and then prices fall to $2.50 average, they can drop the price and take a loss or keep it high and perhaps not make a living, the prices rise to $4 a gallon and they make a solid profit. They have to make it even out or they don't stay in business. I don't know what sort of deal a person or business made to come up with product so I can choose to buy or not, knowing that my choice influences the marketplace ever so slightly.
No sense complaining about it unless you want a different system.
Near then end of the last shortage I stocked up pretty solidly on .22. It seemed cheap at the time but waiting 6-months would have saved me an easy 25%, which I might have felt a little bad about when prices were low, then felt a little smug when they got crazy again. I think we can all agree ammo is a commodity and will experience commodity price variations, you buy and sell that commodity at your own peril.
I contend that if you want to keep shooting in the bad times and the good that it's prudent to keep some decent stock on the shelves.
Saying “you either have a free market or you don’t” is like saying “you can shoot people or you can’t”. It just isn’t that simple. For example what about self defense?
Having a free market also isn’t as simple as just having unrestrained no holds barred capitalism. We probably all agree that monopolies inhibit a free market as the single or small group of sellers can set the price. Avoiding monopolies is one of the reasons we have commerce regulations.
Let’s step away from .22 LR ammo for a minute and talk toilet paper. About 15 months ago a guy and his wife rolled up to the local Walmart and loaded up 15 cases of toilet paper. They’d talked to the manager and bought every roll they had in stock. This was at the very start of the toilet paper panic. They created a spot shortage and he and others like him or panicked by the sudden reduction in toilet paper availability created a panic that in turn ensure was hard to find for months. During this period of time I have no doubt that guy and his wife sold TP on line for a large profit.
I suppose we call all applaud him and others like him nation wide for taking advantage of the situation, cornering their local toilet paper markets and starting a panic that ensured demand outstripped supply, so they could make a quick buck. (Even though absolutely nothing about COVID 19 increased the need or reduced production of TP.). After all that sunrestrined capitalism totally unhinged from any social contract or obligation to your community. That’s a good thing right?
Of course it’s not. It’s not only unethical and immoral to create a crisis during a larger on going crisis, it is also about as unsocial and as frankly as unpatriotic as it gets. Remember the concept of hang together or hang separately and it’s roots in our revolutionary days. Our founding fathers would not be impressed with hoarding in a crisis.
Back to .22 LR, you can look at the same 3 or 4 guys who stalk the local stores, know when the trucks are unloaded and stand in line to buy up all the ammo they can and call them enterprising entrepreneurs. You cannot however say they represent or support a free market. Once again, like the local TP magnate with his 15 cases of toilet paper, they are looking to corner the local ammo market so that they can re-sell it at a 400% markup at the next guns how. Like the TP guy, they are of course assisted by the people they’ve panic who quickly snap up anything they’ve n
Been unable to purchase to keep demand high enough that people will pay their outrageous prices. And it works because people won’t work together to just say “no thanks, at that price you obviously want it about 4 times more than we do”.
However that kind of ammo scalping is not free trade or a free market any more than De Beers controlling the world diamond supply or OPEC setting oil prices is “free market”.
Yet people make claims like that all the time as they’ve been conditioned to believe that anything less than totally unrestrained capitalism is something less than a free market and, as you have stated that it’s a binary choice - we either have it or we don’t - when in fact a free market economy exists in an environment with enough regulation to ensure it’s truly a free market that isn’t abused or cornered by folks with the money or position needed to set prices and control markets, whether it is on a local or national scale.
