Daniel Ruth: A Statist, and a journalist, too!
If you read newspapers for years then you will see all manner of ditzoid craziness that slops its way over the journalistic gunwales -claims of UFO abductions, the conspiracy theorists, Nazi cabals, and people who believe monkeys are taking over the world.
And those are just some of the serious news stories. There are some newspaper writers, too, who are really weird. Take Daniel Ruth. Please, take him. http://rexcurry.net/ruthmore.html
For all the black helicopter sightings and strange arguments that Shecky Green and the Jewish lobby control the government and Y2K means the end of the world, Ruth’s work is perhaps the most twistedly evasive.
Daniel Ruth – a newspaper columnist – weighed in with one long sputtering bluster against free market economics (what Ruth calls “price gouging” – a term Ruth never defines). Ruth wanted to comment on disaster conditions such as those after Hurricane Andrew devastated the city of Homestead in south Florida.
You have to wonder what schools Ruth went to. Government schools? The government taught him everything it knows and he is still stupid. But that is statist quo.
Ruth is also one of the most visible local disciples of the Tampa Tribune, which ought to have his embarrassed fellow travelers donning Groucho Marx disguises around the office and about town.
By the way, Ruth also seems to believe that people who hoard goods in advance of a disaster should be arrested. Why? It’s just too … too … loopy. Reached by phone, Loopy Ruth did his mental blank out when asked whether his support of arresting price gougers also translated into his support for arresting hoarders. Of course, Ruth’s reasoning against his perpetually undefined “price gouging” does justify (and has justified) prohibiting hoarding, arresting consumers who hoard, confiscating their goods, and imposing rationing and general economic socialism, with any disaster as the pretense. Ruth’s brain doesn’t travel that far, though. Indeed, it doesn’t even travel far enough to suspect that some people who hoard before a disaster are the people who are gouging after a disaster.
This space was curious. Since Ruth, the lazy statist from hell, thinks laws against price gouging are so swell, how would he feel if he had to wait longer hours to buy a bag of ice for a government-controlled price, or discover that there was no gas at the government-controlled price?
The Karl Marx of the Twilight Zone responded with a bunch of journalistic babble about injustice in modern America and an attack on free market economics, concluding by accusing this space of being libertarian. I assume that’s bad.
Still the Felliniesque Fidel Castro had never answered the original question.
Ruth pondered another simple query: How would he feel if he personally knew of people taking goods into a disaster area to sell them at prices that were higher than before the disaster? He’d be happy to see them arrested, or to see them personally suffer violence at the hands of statist vigilantes (or maybe both?).
Indeed, it was evident that it had never entered Ruth’s mind, after Hurricane Andrew, to load up a truck with a bunch of necessities, rush into a disaster area and sell people whatever they needed and wanted for whatever they would gladly pay.
This proves three things. A) Statists are greedy, lazy %$#!@?$!#+ who won’t help others, and who will take property from others, and they are nasty people who will use government to get their way. And B) For all his economic claptrap, Daniel Ruth is completely clueless if he thinks no one can go into a disaster area to charge people extra for goods for which they would gladly pay; and C) There is a reason why it never occurs to people like Ruth to load up a truck and drive into any disaster area –but Ruth will never figure out what that reason is, or how it is related to his naive, statist keister and his willingness to kick others around while he whines for more government, in the safety of his cubicle, far from any disaster area.
As well, irrespective of inane statist economic theories or statutes, all laws against price gouging are simply morally wrong because they worsen the circumstances of people when they are at their lowest emotional and financial ebb, forcing them to go without or to endure longer lines and bigger shortages.
It is an essential cornerstone of statists to promote and defend the role of government in virtually all aspects of life. That sounds fine until the socialist bureaucrats arrive to pick away at human pride with their economic disasters before, during and after a natural disaster.
The irony, of course, is that one of the reasons we have so much prosperity and abundance, even with Ruth’s perpetually undefined “price-gouging”, is because a free market protects the public against the likes of the Daniel Ruth’s of the world.
For not only is Ruth a writer with a big public forum, his reasoning is that of half-baked socialism/statism. Terrifying.
For more on Ruth’s defeat in a public debate challenge see
http://rexcurry.net/ruthmore.html
Dan Ruth http://rexcurry.net/DAN-RUTH-socialism.jpg
Charlie Chaplin disguise
Other descriptions of Daniel Ruth’s ignorance:
“News media throughout the United States and especially here in the southeast have been reporting extensively on gasoline shortages. Over 90% of service stations are without gas at any one time in the metro Atlanta area. When a supply truck arrives, car drivers drive long distances and wait in lines 10 or more cars long, blocking roads and intersections to get gas, typically exhausting the station’s new supply within hours. The media also reports on Georgia laws against gas price “gouging” – whereby stations attempting to sell gas at an undefined “too high” price can be subject to $15,000 penalties; other states in the southeast have similar laws. The news media, however, neglect to point out how these two issues are necessarily connected.” from Government Gouging by Aaron Bilger 9-29-08
And federal appeals court judge Richard Posner said on his blog in 2007 in the wake of Hurricane Katrina that calls for anti-gouging laws reflect “sheer ignorance of basic economics (a failure of our educational system) and demagogic appeals by politicians to that ignorance.”
For a blog about Ruthless stupidity from Daniel Ruth see
http://www.getruthless.blogspot.com
Daniel Ruth News 
