Sunday, August 22, 2004

Jacoby's column in today's

Sunday Globe is a minor masterpiece…pursuant to the hurricane damage in Florida Jeff actually attempts to argue that price gouging speeds the recovery effort.
This would be funny if the poor and the elderly weren’t paying thirty bucks for a bag of ice needed to keep one’s medication appropriately chilled.
Obviously Jeff just doesn’t see it in those terms.
High prices, he pontificates, will price in more commodities from merchants seeking a big pay off thus the hidden hand will soon be raising roofs in the trailer parks up and down Fort Myers Beach.
Exploitation is good sayeth the laughing young senescence.
This assumes of course that it is economic to send truckloads of ice and other necessities down the gulf Coast’s battered and shattered highways in search of a big pay off.
It may not be on grounds that a one hundred percent mark up in the price of chain saws is preventing anyone from clearing the fallen trees.
Oh I could go on this vein….but why bother?
If price gouging is so damn wonderful why not privatize FEMA and extract payment from the locals for every service rendered?
By Jeff’s logic this is exactly what we should do in order to rebuild the Gulf Coast in jig-time.

There is something about Jeff’s Sunday column that is especially dogmatic and hilariously narrow minded. It is like he has had two full working days to evolve an exquisitely inane defense of whatever he thinks is imperiling conservative theology this week.
There is however something desperate,humorless, and almost missionary about his constant defenses of the holy free market. No matter how irrelevant the situation there we will find Jeff Jacoby unashamedly down on his knees before the pagan idol of raw commerce, abasing himself in the most crude and servile fashion possible.

Sad really…no sorry it’s freakin’ hilarious.



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