There is No Such Thing as Price Gouging

Roy Cooper should go the way of Mike Nifong for this.

1. It's not the government's gas station. Station owners should be able to charge anything they want.

2. Price reflects supply and demand. If the station owners kept the prices artificially low, they would have run out of gas more quickly. (This is, in fact, what happened under N.C.'s stupid "gouging" laws.)

3. If there had been cheaper alternatives nearby, then the price would have been wrong. That's what competition is.

4. Roy Cooper is trying to make his career on a couple of gas station owners who were trying rationally to determine an optimum gas price during a shortage.

5. Gas station owners worried about further shortages are acting reasonably in raising prices. Some gas is better than no gas. No gas, no customers. No customers, no business.

The Attorney General's office should be ashamed. They are acting as thieves on behalf of customers with silly, populist ideas on the way economics and the world works.