White House 'free marketeers' raised concerns over coronavirus price-gouging crackdown

[muriel_volestrangler]

Fucking typical:

So in late March, the Justice Department rolled out a task force that would focus on hoarding and price-gouging. Attorney General William Barr touted its work at a White House news conference, and deputized Craig Carpenito — the U.S. attorney for New Jersey — to lead the nationwide effort. “[W]e will aggressively pursue bad actors who amass critical supplies either far beyond what they could use or for the purpose of profiteering,” Barr wrote in a memo to U.S attorneys’ offices around the country. “Scarce medical supplies need to be going to hospitals for immediate use in care, not to warehouses for later overcharging.” Each office was directed to name one attorney to coordinate the efforts, and the department set up a hotline for tips. And soon enough, the task force brought a headline-grabbing case against a man who lied about medical supplies he had accumulated and then claimed to have Covid-19 before coughing on FBI agents.

But behind the scenes, according to people familiar with the discussions, some White House officials expressed reservations and concerns about the task force’s approach, and some disagreed with DOJ officials about how to use one particular legal authority. The people helming the response faced a brave new legal challenge: how to target price-gougers and hoarders under the Defense Production Act, a decades-old law that grants the feds broad authority over the private sector during national emergencies.
...
“This was more of a philosophical dispute between people who wanted to go aggressively after those who were hoarding and gouging, and those more partial to letting the market sort it out,” said one of the sources with knowledge of the discussions.
...
The resistance from White House staffers materialized shortly after the rollout of the task force, according to the people familiar with the situation. It came from staffers whom one source described as “free-marketeers,” who felt the massive influx of people wheeling and dealing for PPE was a sign that the free market was working efficiently to move materials where they needed to go. One free market tenet is that market forces act as an invisible hand, moving goods and services when and where they need to be in the most efficient way possible and unlocking supplies that may previously have gone untapped. If prices of, say, N95 masks seem exorbitantly high—well, that’s what market conditions dictate. Government intervention, in this view, only gums things up—at best. White House staffers who raised concerns about the task force’s work were of that school of thought.

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/07/03/white-house-coronavirus-price-gouging-348434

While it's hard to call anything rattling around in Trump's brain "philosophy", you can bet that if he wasn't president, he would have tried to cash in on coronavirus with some scams. The "philosophy" here is "Greed is Good". Trump's idea of a "free market" is "anything that doesn't get me sent to jail is good".

[elias7]

1. "Let the market sort it out", just like the $6 trillion they're holding up the market with now

Free marketeers are so full of sh*t. Government bails out anything deemed too big to fail. We are just kidding ourselves, though people continue to use the “free market” argument to justify their screwing of their fellow human being

[2naSalit]

2. +1

[2naSalit]

3. K&R