Smart/Good Business or Plain Greed

Our Nation is hit by 5 to 12 typhoons every year which destroy food crops, buildings, roads and delivery of goods delays. This means we buy more hardware goods for roofing, glass windows, cement to repair the damaged and washed roads, bridges, houses, telephone lines, water pipes etc. Prices of vegetables, canned goods, rice, shake, shiver, simmer, because there’s not enough or because of destroyed/damaged bridges, roads, ports. They do not reach the stores at once. Farmers raised the price of rice, vegetables, foodstuffs so they can recover their losses. The middle men/viajeros after buying in the farms, sell them adding the extra cost to market sellers who sell them to market vendors/retailers. The price of pechay in the province goes up 200 to 400% when it reaches the consumer. Congress pass laws limiting/fixing prices of food supplies theoretically help the consumer.

Those who raise prices after the Calamity (Typhoon, Pandemic, Earthquake, etc.) from the farmer, producer, transporters, middlemen, and wholesalers are called greedy. The government in penalizing those who increase prices of food, fixing the prices of goods is called ignorant of the Law of supply and demand. Ethics/morality and economics are different. Economics follow the moral law of supply and demand. Moral/ethical response sometimes create bad effects.

Consider these: 1. Did the stores conspire to raise their prices at the same time and almost the same amount? That’s price fixing and against the Codigo Penal and Codigo Civil. 2. Do the storeowners sell out at once their current stocks at jacked up prices, shut their doors and go on vacations with their waterfall profits? That is their right. But they’re taking advantage of their neighbor’s misfortune which is neither compassionate human behavior nor good business management. 3. Do storeowners use fantastic profits to book large new orders to hoard the much needed food of the massa and then sell them at even more super galactic profits. 4. What if the storeowners, instead of selling, hold public auctions/subasta not per unit but per box or lot?

Is this bad for the rich who can afford and are willing to pay more to cause skyrocketing prices? What about the poor? How will they eat/live? The law of supply and demand indirectly is saying, everyone for himself, Am I my brother’s keeper? Take care of yourself because you’re the only one you’ve got. If you don’t love yourself, who else will, or as Humphrey Bogart as Ricky in the film Casablanca “I stick my neck out for nobody.” What about the Good Samaritan? The 5 loaves of bread and 2 fishes for 5,000 men excluding women and children. Freely given by the apostles? We never learn.