That's Not What I Meant!

Recently Jimmy Akin has been having an interesting discussion about the price of goods in emergencies. He argues that what many people have recently been calling "price gouging," for instance, the sudden steep rise in gas prices following the damage to oil refineries by Hurricane Katrina, are not motivated by greed, but in fact reflect a shift in the natural price point of the commodity due to changed circumstances. However, another writer, Scott Richart of ChroniclesMagazine.Org, has argued on the basis of the concept of a "just price" that this is not true, and that there is an objectively proper price, at least for vital necessities, that should not be exceeded no matter the economic situation.

Part of the problem here is the simple fact that money has multiple uses, among them a metric of economic choice ("you may have A or B, but not A and B, pick one"), and a long-term store of value. When goods are in short supply, raising prices enables the seller to restrict the buyer's range of economic choices, thus reducing the likelihood of panic buying on the part of the first few people to arrive, which would leave the seller without anything to sell to later customers, who might well be more truly needy than those people who simply happened to get there fastest and grab with the biggest hands. (Jimmy Akin's argument) Sounds quite rational -- except that money also functions as a long-term store of value. If the store owner doesn't have to use that money to buy goods at inflated prices, but can instead hold onto the money until after the crisis is over and prices return to normal, the store owner is now wealthier and the customers poorer, leading to feelings that the store owner has improperly gained at the expense of others' misfortune. (Scott Richart's argument) Once one realizes that each correspondent is looking primarily at a different function of money, but that neither is realizing this disparity, the argument takes on a whole new level of meaning.

So how does all this relate to writing? Often, there is a tendency for writers to create overly simplistic conflicts -- everything is on the surface, and arguments between characters really are about what they're arguing about and nothing more. But in life arguments are often about something other than what they really seem to be about -- which is often how arguments escalate far out of proportion to the apparent issue, simply because the unrecognized real issues at stake are far higher than the relatively trivial issue that started the fight. Awareness of the difference between surface and underlying conflicts can often make the difference between an idiot plot, in which the characters refuse to take the obvious steps to resolve the conflict solely so the author can keep the story going, and a story that has the potential to keep the reader thinking long after THE END has been reached.