Rationing in the eBay Era

The Rights of Persons doctrine argues that everyone has a set of basic rights and that actions are ethical to the extent that they attempt to preserve those rights for everyone.

In times of critical shortages, this view often leads to the development of rationing systems whose goal is to guarantee that everyone gets a fair share of the goods that are available. Note that this contrasts with an alternative approach in which we simply let supply and demand drive prices up (with the result that the rich people get everything and the poor people get nothing).

The last time there was a significant rationing program in the United States was during the Second World War. Our access to imported goods was drastically reduced at the same time that demand increased for goods that could be used in direct support of the war effort. The supply of some goods to the consumer market was thus drastically curtailed. Enter ration books. For descriptions of the process and some pictures of the books, see:

· Indiana Historical Society Library

· A page from Genealogy Today

In England, rationing was even more severe and applied to many non-food items, such as clothing:

· An overview

· A page from Homework Help

It isn’t easy to swap butter, but it is straightforward to swap clothes, and people routinely swapped and passed “hand-me-downs” from older children to younger ones.

At the time of the Second World War, the notion of a retail store was reasonably well-defined. To get something at a store, you had to produce your ration coupons. You could, of course, engage in private trading in whatever ways you liked. And, in England, there were swap shops that operated outside the ration system and that supported the reuse of such things as clothes.

In the United States today, we import almost all of our clothes and shoes. Suppose we find ourselves in a war. Naval blockades (as well as a variety of other problems) have cut off our supply of imported goods. We can produce some goods domestically, but in quantities that are only a small fraction of what we’re used to. We want to allocate those scarce goods in an equitable fashion. So we propose to return to the days of ration coupons. Of course, the coupons will be electronically allocated and accounted for. That’s the obvious difference from the way it was done 65 years ago.

But we must address an additional problem that arises from today’s technology. Traditional approaches to rationing exploit the distinction between retail stores (that sell the new merchandise that is now in short supply) and trading venues (that simply improve the efficiency with which we use what we’ve already got by moving things from people who aren’t using them to people who will). In the traditional approach, consumers are issued coupons. They spend them at retail stores that collect them and return them to the government in exchange for the right to receive new shipments of goods. Meanwhile, personal bartering, as well as more organized trading venues, operate outside of the ration system.

But now consider eBay (and Craig’s List and other auction and exchange sites). One thing that these sites have done is to erode the distinction between the retail sale of new goods and the swap of old ones. Sometimes it takes reading the fine print on eBay to discover whether you’re looking at a “previously owned” object or a new one that is being sold by a retail outlet that just happens to have their store front on eBay. In this environment, how could rationing work?

Write a short essay (just one paragraph may be enough) that sketches a plan for rationing in the eBay era. How could a rationing system be structured? Who would be allowed to accept shipments of new goods? How could a black market be avoided? Try to come up with answers to these questions that don’t, as a consequence, squash the legitimate (and now even more important) role of trading venues in allowing us to make maximal use of the limited supply of goods that we do have.

Bring you essay to class and come to class prepared to describe your solution to the class.