Masks seized by .Gov from hoarder

The question we need to be asking is why a damned individual is more prepared than our friggin' healthcare system.
That’s actually an easy one, an individual can invest in whatever nutty way he wants, the healthcare system has to report to shareholders and regulators and if they were throwing away $10m worth of expired supplies every month they’d be handed their head.
 
I am on the fence about this one. Free enterprise is all well and good but if you engage in it you have to do so in the same way everyone else does. Meaning he might have planned ahead and bought up a lot of stock but he didn't plan for the down side. His down side was the gov. stepping in but in the free market stuff happens and he didn't plan for that.

If suddenly the problem cleared up and his supply of equipment was suddenly worthless, that would be the market saying "don't need it" and he would be stuck with a huge loss. That's free market.

In this case, it wasn't the market or demand or anything that caused the loss, it was theft. Maybe he can claim the loss against his insurance?
 
That’s actually an easy one, an individual can invest in whatever nutty way he wants, the healthcare system has to report to shareholders and regulators and if they were throwing away $10m worth of expired supplies every month they’d be handed their head.


Well, now we know what grandma's life is worth, I suppose.
 
The question we need to be asking is why a damned individual is more prepared than our friggin' healthcare system.
That’s easy. An individual has the free will to do as they wish. Wanna waste/gamble your own money? Have at it.
An employee (public or private) has to follow rules/regulations/processes in order to spend company funds. With no present pandemic, they have no proof upon which to make an argument to stock up. They can’t do so on a gut feeling. And even if that was substantiated, how would they guess that N95 masks would be the biggest concern? Not water, medication, antibacterial soap, food, etc etc?
 
If suddenly the problem cleared up and his supply of equipment was suddenly worthless, that would be the market saying "don't need it" and he would be stuck with a huge loss. That's free market.

In this case, it wasn't the market or demand or anything that caused the loss, it was theft. Maybe he can claim the loss against his insurance?


Yes and that would be a loss. In this case he lost nothing. He just didn't make a killing like he hoped. Like I said life ain't fair , neither is business.
 
The Presidential Task Force was just bragging about "Sherriff " AG Barr in this case... "There will be more"
 
I'm not convinced this was some blue collar guy living in a small, average type neighborhood that filled up his two car garage with 190,000 masks. I'd bet there is a business / company involved here somewhere. Lots of info missing from the article.


"In addition to N95 masks, authorities seized 598,000 medical grade gloves, 130,000 surgical masks, as well as procedure masks, N100 masks, surgical gowns, disinfectant towels, particulate filters, bottles of hand sanitizer and bottles of spray disinfectant. "
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I'm not surprised (except that he was given anything at all for the confiscated goods).

This is just Civil Asset Forfeiture all growed up. Part & parcel of muscle flexing in these new & exciting times.
 
So they stole all of his product and are only going to pay him pre-panic prices. Not clear if that’s retail or wholesale but regardless, he may still lose out financially despite being a better planner than the masses.

Depending on how deeply he’s gouging people, it changes my view on how much of an ass he is. Regardless, the gov should have no legal standing on taking his stuff. Rather, they should negotiate a fair price to buy it all, maybe 2-3x msrp, not 5-10x though.

i wouldn’t call it “better planning” as much greater “opportunistic scumbag”. Now that being said opportunist scumbaggery is not illegal. He should be socially shamed and free market kicking his ass via banning from amazon and such like the TN guy.
 
"free market, except when we decide after the fact we don't like the way you are doing and change the rules retroactively"
is just like
"I support the second amendment, but..."

No thanks. Not that I get a vote on that.
 
i wouldn’t call it “better planning” as much greater “opportunistic scumbag”. Now that being said opportunist scumbaggery is not illegal. He should be socially shamed and free market kicking his ass via banning from amazon and such like the TN guy.
What if this pandemic never took off in the US? He took a gamble, might win, might lose. That’s his risk. The gov shouldn’t be jumping in here.
Had he hoarded all the masks and refused to sell them at any price, I’d argue that’s a form of terrorism and then the gov as a duty to step in.
He can be shamed all day, all the way to the bank, in an ideal free market world.

As for Amazon, they’ve always had rules against price gouging, they just rarely enforce it. You can find all kinds of limited edition items marked way up because of supply & demand, they never do a thing about it. In this case, thankfully they jumped right on it and chose to enforce their longstanding rule. That is a perfect example of a risk these sellers took. They could sell for 50-100% markup and probably fly under Amazons radar, but when sellers tried for 5-10x+, Amazon saw that immediately and shut these guys down. Then it’s on to plan B for the sellers. eBay followed suit, shut them down. Plan C... and so on.
 
"Gov. Phil Murphy has given New Jersey State Police orders to take"
NJ is a shite hole.
Cooper, I demand you close our borders to the north!

given what I’ve seen coming out of the Red states such as SC, and purple states like VA, I’d say f*^% they all.

No one government is the problem any longer, it’s that we’ve let government get to big. Period. Militarization of the police used to be all the rage. Looks like we are not far off from militarization of the Red Cross at this point.

no location is immune, if SC is not the absolutely epitome of that.
 
From the article.

"HHS said it will pay the owner of the hoarded equipment the “fair market value” for the supplies, based on prices before the coronavirus was declared a pandemic. "

Ya I read that. What I was asking is if they went to him with an offer to purchase before just stealing his stuff. Or if they robbed him first and then thought it would be nice to give him some money for his personal property.
 
Ya I read that. What I was asking is if they went to him with an offer to purchase before just stealing his stuff. Or if they robbed him first and then thought it would be nice to give him some money for his personal property.
The guy was arrested for price gouging and his "inventory" was seized.
 
So....in you opinion if he was not trying to sell any...just keep it for himself...would the. Gov have a right to just take it?

Nobody has 200k masks for personal use. That's an apples and oranges question. And the AG clearly said personal use, even a personal stockpile, was not a problem. With that kind of stash he was profiteering on this. Buying up supplies in those quantities can start to effect the market, in his favor. I'd like to know what kind of markup he was running, but I imagine it was significant. If he was selling at market value, I bet there would not be an issue and he could have likely dumped it all on the state at market price. Which includes him making a profit on it. That's not what happened.

This also just happened on a corporate scale. Going to be interesting to see if all the ideals hold when it's not just Joe Schmuck price gouging but an entire industry leader working outside fair market sales to the detriment of the people in the country that made that company what it is. And completely decimating the supply of needed equipment in their own damn country. While possibly taking tax payer money to ramp up production. All that is private property too. Wonder how folks will feel with that blows wide open.


Edit, looks like I found my answer. Mask are roughly $1 ish each normally. He was getting at least $12 each for them. Yeah, screw him. Not gonna feel bad about this one. He wasn't charging a little more to compensate for them being hard to get. He was screwing the health care folks that are putting their lives on the line to save people. It's not their fault the Gov is incompetent. But they would sure as hell pay the price for it with their health or pay financially for it and that's not a choice they should have to make.
 
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Edit, looks like I found my answer. Mask are roughly $1 ish each normally. He was getting at least $12 each for them. Yeah, screw him. Not gonna feel bad about this one. He wasn't charging a little more to compensate for them being hard to get. He was screwing the health care folks that are putting their lives on the line to save people. It's not their fault the Gov is incompetent. But they would sure as hell pay the price for it with their health or pay financially for it and that's not a choice they should have to make.

Not trying to defend the scum bag but I don’t think we really “know” what the fair market value is for masks right now.

Before the shortage individual masks were $3+ and a box of generic non medical N95 Home Depot ones were like $20 for 15.

JR automation put in a manufacturing line for GM to make masks in 6 days. 50,000 masks a day. But that line must have been at least 3x the cost or more as normal to expedite all of the materials, components and fabrications plus all the overtime to design, build, wire, program and debug a line. That normal takes 12-20 weeks for an automation cell.

What is the fair market value now? I have no clue. Plus now all the materials are in depend for manufacturing.

Is it $12 per mask? Probably not. But it could be easily $6 which they would still probably labeling as illegal price gouging.

EDIT: Additional, people are buying and making equipment that will be used this one time. The “fair market value” to recoup the investment would be huge compared to costs a few months ago.
 
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"In addition to N95 masks, authorities seized 598,000 medical grade gloves..."

Because that sounds SO much more than 5,980 boxes of gloves.

Just like "The police confiscated 1,000 rounds of ammunition" sounds SO much more than "The police confiscated two boxes of WWB 9mm and two boxes of CCI .22 LR".
 
That’s actually an easy one, an individual can invest in whatever nutty way he wants, the healthcare system has to report to shareholders and regulators and if they were throwing away $10m worth of expired supplies every month they’d be handed their head.

Google "Certificate of Need laws".
 
Because that sounds SO much more than 5,980 boxes of gloves.
I think 5,980 boxes sounds like a whole lot of gloves. Even saying 500 cases doesn’t make it sound reasonable. 42 gross doesn’t seem so bad, but only because most people wouldn’t have a clue.
 
That’s actually an easy one, an individual can invest in whatever nutty way he wants, the healthcare system has to report to shareholders and regulators and if they were throwing away $10m worth of expired supplies every month they’d be handed their head.
I should add, by the same token the investors should recognize that they might have to pay inflated prices in times of crisis. Should the government step in to save these investors a bunch of money because of a risk they knew about and could have planned for, probably not, but having voters die because healthcare workers walk out isn’t a good way to get votes.
 
As I understand this, they were being sold to go outside of the US. I guess we could have out bid others for them to keep them here.

But we are on a war time footing here. I kind of look at it as if he has a small stock pile of arms or ammo and was selling it to another country. His actions could cost Americans lives.

So I am ok with this. I am sure he could have went to NYS and sold for a great profit, but looks like he was trying milk it too much.
 
I walked into Walmart the other day looking for hamburger. The entire meat case was wiped out. I ask if the crazies were still coming through and the cashier told me it had actually been a quite day. I asked if they didn’t get a shipment of meat. She said it was almost full that morning but some guy bought everything and was marking it up and selling it from his home. Well that was on the Walmart manager for letting one person get everything! The person that bought it had every right to sell it for whatever they could get for it. Now I have every right to either buy it from them at the going rate, or tell them to stick it up their azz and hope every bit of it rots on them! MY choice, not the government’s!
 
We didn't start the fire
It was always burning
Since the world's been turning
 
People that do this knowingly and willingly help create a shortage, so that they can profit on the suffering of others. No sympathy here.
 
What’s wrong with out of country sales? According to a Florida official, even 3M is selling orders directly to other countries instead of the US. Even 3M’s actions show that it’s all, and I mean all, about the money.

And if I remember right, last night the Prez outed them and slapped them with War Time act to keep it for USA

3m.JPG
 
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