It’s not unusual to find a wide disparity in the retail price of gas. For example, in Raleigh today, according to RaleighGasPrices.com, the pump price for regular unleaded gasoline ranges from $2.78 to $3.19 per gallon. That is a 41-cent difference just here in Raleigh. (I recently saw a 46-cent disparity in the space of two blocks.)
Still, statists, “liberals” and Aspiring Governors like to pretend they know the True Price of things ? including gasoline ? and therefore when a retailer has criminally differed from that True Price. Today, for example, “State Attorney General Roy Cooper is taking on a gas distributor who he accused of illegally conspiring to fix prices and trying to force at least one gas station to raise its prices.”
The problem is, there are two ways to vary from the True Price of something: either too high or too low. A price that’s too high is “price-gouging,” which harms consumers, who are presumed to be so stupid as to be held hostage by a retailer’s price-setting. A price that’s too low is “unfair competition,” which harms the retailer’s competition, who are presumed not to know their own industry well enough to know when a competitor’s low pricing is so unsustainable that if they were to persist, they’d put themselves out of business.
When there exist confusion over the True Price and a great price disparity, then apparently the only determining factor for which price (high or low) is at variance from the True Price is which retailer goes yelping to the AG first. Therefore, it seems to me that in order to avoid a suit for price-gouging, high-price retailers should sue the low-price retailers first. Their choices seem stark: either claim “victim” status and sue or risk being sued by your “victims.”
