Sure. It's a classic rhetorical technique, and the conditions for it to work are well known.
It's a variant of "trust me", and that works if and only if the audience considers you trustworthy. So it wasn't terribly likely to work for someone like Boris Johnson, whose recent history chiefly consists of using bonmots to deflect blame for a series of failures. But it worked for Angela Merkel six years ago, when she said "wir schaffen das" about an impending crisis, and the great majority trusted her judgment.
Yes it does, in every other country. This is exactly what happened last year with the toilet paper "shortage" where people emptied the stock by panic buying and then the food "shortage" when Curry's went out of freezers because people were panic buying and stockpiling food. These images could only be seen in the UK, no other European country had this problem. Now it's happening again. Exactly the same. The British are morons, on average, at best, hopefully.
I'm British and agree that our general public are morons, but I was living in France at the time of coronavirus panic buying, and it definitely happened in other European countries. Pasta aisles laid bare, fights at checkout queues - stupidity has no borders.
If you were in the UK at the time you would've seen much worse than pasta shortage, eg. people were getting stabbed in London over toilet paper. There are times when it's completely acceptable to panic. This is not one of those times. A shortage of anything in this country is a self-fulfilling prophecy. What these panic-buying idiots don't understand is that their stockpiling of fuel will have negative consequences for the entire economy. Entities who really depend on fuel, such as delivery drivers, will have to stop working which will actually cause a shortage of goods and services, which will fuel the panic even further. This madness is created by the people, brainless morons who read The Sun like Muslims read Koran.
The good news is you can only really fill up once. You’ve got to use the fuel, so this should be a short-term thing,” he said.
But you can fill up gas cans, 5 gallon buckets, even plastic bags and buy a months worth of fuel in a day. Last time this happened in the USA I don’t even know what people were going to do with what they were buying, like a 250 gallon tank of fuel… resell it?
I think I remember last time there was a fuel shortage in the UK and people were panic buying there were several stories of people dying from fumes or house fires started after people did stupid things like storing petrol in saucepans in their kitchen.
In at least some states in the US it is only legal to store it in approved containers, although I don't know if the gas stations would stop you if you tried to fill up a bucket or plastic bag.
It's not a supply/demand problem, they have enough fuel for everyone but due to a lorry driver shortage deliveries now take ~10 days whereas previously they were within 24h. The shortages are because demand over this type of timespan is unpredictable.
So yes, "allowing supply and demand to work" is a stupid idea that patently does not work at all, as exemplified by the ridiculous toilet paper shortage of 2020.
The fuel would not go to the people that need it the most, it will just go to the people that can afford to pay the most.
Market allocations happen not on need but on liquidity. In that aspect it's fundamentally inferior to that other mechanism that distributes according to need and from ability.
Not quite true. Although very wealthy people could afford to pay a high price for fuel for frivolous reasons, most people (even the wealthy) would tend to avoid doing so. So if a middle-class person were planning on using fuel to go on a road trip, they might postpone or cancel the event, which would help to ease the demand. Whereas if a relatively poor person were planning on using the fuel to go on a road trip - to attend the funeral of a loved-one - they might decide it's worth any cost and go anyway. Hence the people that need the fuel the most are able to use it, whereas the people who merely would like it are not. This extends to far more important operations: If an organ-delivery service needs the fuel to get a living heart from a donor to someone whose life depends on it, they're able to pay the added cost. In a system where prices are fixed too low to quell demand the heart patient will pass away due to lack of availability of fuel. It's literally a matter of life-or-death that prices be able to rise to quell demand.
> In a system where prices are fixed too low to quell demand
Yeah, that would be a pretty stupid system, I wholeheartedly agree. In situations where there's not enough supply to a indispensable good, rationing seems the only logical approach.
If we must throw around such accusations to stop a meaningful discussion, here's mine: I think that there's a pretty good argument to be made that Capitalism is actually the most murderous ideology since.. ever? After all, it's estimated that the yearly death toll due to systemic poverty is about 18'000'000 per year[0][1].
Now, I'm not sure at what target your dismissive statement was aimed. Communism? Socialism? The phrase "From each according to their abilities to each according to their needs" is a phrase with long tradition, with some attributing the phrase to Morelly[2], so much earlier than the 'canonical' origins of socialism or communism. And the idea goes back much further than that.
But I'm not actually of the opinion that ideologies cause or solve problems. People cause or solve problems. Ideologies simply give people the justification for their actions. Most of the time people just do their stuff and find an excuse later.
Instead we should try to find ways to apply certain ideologies where they make sense. Want to develop an emerging market? Sounds like a job for some capitalism. Need to maintain a shared infrastructure? Pretty sure that socialism will create better results.
What we can see is that especially with indispensable goods and services, capitalism does bad job as soon as it comes to shortages.
> Yet repeated attempts by authorities to spread calm and urge against panic buying have had the opposite effect.
IMO academia should research this. There are probably enough events + news on those events in this world. If the research is already done then I urge policy makers + mainstream media to read such research carefully.
This thing is simple. You build trust by being right, or you can use it (and perhaps wear it down) by relying on that trust. Sometimes when you use people's trust in you, you can resolve the problem using that trust as a tool, but if the problem happens anyway, you wear down your trust.
A particular kind of organisation suggested that there'd be problems due to lack of fruit pickers, government said no, the organisation turned out to be right and it could be seen in the shops. A similar kind of organisation suggested that there'd be problems with haulage and transport, government said the problems would be manageable and managed, the organisation turned out to be right and it could be seen in the shops. Now a third organisation is saying the same kind of thing, this time about fuel.
What is there to research? It seems obvious that people don't trust the authorities to have their best interests at heard when the authorities offer suggestions.
> Yet repeated attempts by authorities to spread calm and urge against panic buying have had the opposite effect.
I think it's the government... but a reasonably functional supply chain won't let this happen. Most people do not panic by news; but they'll panic buy when they find out that some stations have run out of fuel.
Was told by someone in the UK trucking industry this is mindless panic as some people have moved from HGV fuel trucks to regular as the salaries on regular trucking caught up with fuel trucks (and fuel trucks are far more dangerous so people just jumped ship).
One particular agency that has a big market share in the industry seems to be the issue (he said). Seems like they lost tons of drivers and havent raised salaries to meet lowered interest from truckers who can now make the same money from not carrying what’s effectively a mobile bomb.
> Mr Madderson said a government media leak on BP’s earlier decision to restrict fuel deliveries to about 100 of its 1,200 stations had been largely responsible for the mayhem.
> “That leak to a broadcaster has brought about the quite catastrophic situation we’re now in, where there is panic buying,” he said.
the UK has ~8500 petrol stations... around 1% had a shortage before the media amplified everything
Same what happened with toilet paper last year in Germany. I never felt such a panic. This is a taste of what collapse will feel like. Only that there will be nothing to panic buy again, the week after.
Right, so they should have a competitive advantage over those "traditional" fossil-fuel burning electricity suppliers. That is, they can continue selling renewable electricity unaffected by gas prices.
Well, yeah, because electricity is fungible. Other power providers that can't get the electricity they need from gas are turning to renewables, driving up prices for everyone.
That's not what's happening. Coal-fired power stations are being re-activated to cover the shortfall.
You do raise a good point - as electricity is fungible, and the power grid is built, operated, and maintained by a national institution, then how can a particular energy provider promise that their power is more renewable than that from the the others? Otherwise, every time Bulb gets a new customer, we are supposed to believe that they get all the renewable electrons, and the power supplied to the rest of us is just a bit more fossil-fueled.
I do know the answer, and that is that those companies just buy and sell the various "pinky promise" certificates and accreditations that pass for being "renewable" and "carbon-neutral" , and have nothing at all to do with actually boosting the supply of renewables.
Yeah not sure why the thread ended up restricting the domestic electricity source to solar. The main conversation is what to do when gas stations cannot be re-fueled due to truck-driver-shortage-induced panic buying, and not because there is a general fuel shortage that would affect electricity distribution
Maybe, but this is a fun diversion that OP started.
The UK is also suffering from a fuel shortage that is affecting electricity distribution, exacerbated by a heavy reliance on wind and an ongoing period of low winds.
Oddly enough, it's all the little "100% renewable" power companies that are going bust, when you'd think they were independent of natural gas prices.
I was making a comment about the supply of natural gas for electricity generation. Gas prices have spiked, which is causing issues. Several providers have already gone bust.
It's still playing out as we head into winter, and is already being called a crisis. I've based my life around having everything within cycling distance, so should be ok as long as the roads don't get icy!
Did that ever work in any country?