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Providing something for free is not exactly charging a price, but it is also not something they do. At least I seldom see a restaurant have people in need come

Providing something for free is not exactly charging a price, but it is also not something they do. At least I seldom see a restaurant have people in need come into the restaurant and eat for free next to people that are paying. However, to bend your analogy to the current situation, you come into the restaurant, there is no menu, the chef decides what you need, you find out how much it cost weeks later, the price can vary 500% based on which "hunger insurance" plan you have selected. If the restaurant decides to give you the meal for free, they come up with the highest possible price for tax purposes.

cjhopman 6y ago
Sure and an argument could be made that the specific things happening in this situation are wrong. That's not the argument that I replied to. I replied to a flippant argument that it is always wrong to charge different people different amounts. I just went to what I considered a clear counterexample, though it does have problems that it is rare (though local coffee shops and bakeries, for example, fairly regularly will provide things for free to those in need within the store exactly like they would for regular customers). Is it wrong for universities to provide financial aid to those in need? Would it be wrong for a city to provide subsidized public transportation? subsidized school lunches? You can come up with other harder to decide examples. A really good one would be whether it's wrong to charge tourists and locals different amounts. On the one side, this feels unfair to the tourists, why should they have to pay more? Generally, I lean to unfair things being wrong. But, the consequences of charging them the same are, to me, much worse, especially as the means of the two become further and further apart.
- specialist 6y ago
  Discounting a known price is very different from just making up prices on the spot.

cjhopman 6y ago

Sure and an argument could be made that the specific things happening in this situation are wrong. That's not the argument that I replied to. I replied to a flippant argument that it is always wrong to charge different people different amounts. I just went to what I considered a clear counterexample, though it does have problems that it is rare (though local coffee shops and bakeries, for example, fairly regularly will provide things for free to those in need within the store exactly like they would for regular customers). Is it wrong for universities to provide financial aid to those in need? Would it be wrong for a city to provide subsidized public transportation? subsidized school lunches? You can come up with other harder to decide examples. A really good one would be whether it's wrong to charge tourists and locals different amounts. On the one side, this feels unfair to the tourists, why should they have to pay more? Generally, I lean to unfair things being wrong. But, the consequences of charging them the same are, to me, much worse, especially as the means of the two become further and further apart.

specialist 6y ago
Discounting a known price is very different from just making up prices on the spot.