There are laws preventing someone from jacking up the prices of necessary items during emergencies. But I think the law of supply and demand is the only thing stopping you from selling a baseball hat for $20,000.
If it can be proven to be "self dealing" aka your NGO, charity, or non profit purchases or accepts a tax deductible donation of say, a portrait of you, from you or one of your businesses for hypothetically, 100 million dollars, then you may, if you did something particularly odious such as say, run for president. Then you might lose the legal ability to run that sort of organization.
This is the correct answer. Overcharging (and self-dealing) is typically used in tax fraud and money laundering.
Of course, no one would actually do that, especially if they were to later do something as public as running for president. The entire justice system, due to its fair and impartial nature, would come crashing down on their head with every resource at its disposal, and the people would riot in the streets if it treated such egregious crimes as less important than passing a bad $20 bill.
Even Martin Skreli, the dipshit who jacked up insulin prices by 300% didn’t get in trouble for that; he went to prison for security fraud or someshit.
However, if there was say a crisis going on and you raised the price of water you were selling to capitalize on others’ misfortune that tends to be illegal. Like when stores were price gouging on hand sanitizer during the height of the covid lockdowns.
In addition to what others have posted, as long as you’re honest about it just being a hat and not making any special claims about it (like it was owned or worn by a famous person), I think you’re good.
In certain circumstances you’re not even allowed to sell things for more if someone OFFERS it! For example, if you have pallets and pallets of bottled water, and a hurricane just tore through, all of a sudden your water is much more valuable. You could conceivably sell it all for 10 or 20 times the price.
But that’s called price gouging, it’s illegal, and it’s something that only total potatoes do. It’s also something that might get you hurt later, once things settle down and people remember that you were trying to charge them $20 for a bottle of water when there was a boil water order on.
I don’t think there’s any Federal laws against it, but the closest I can think of is that in many states there’s laws against price gouging in some situations (after a state of emergency has been declared, may only apply to certain essential goods/services), here’s a FAQ on California’s anti-price gouging laws:
No, not really. If there was some other goal besides the honest exchange of the hat for the money, then maybe. Fraud (“the hats made of gold and is therefore a great value!”) and price gouging (“it’s the only hat for sale on a sunny day so I’m selling it at a 1000x markup!”) might be crimes in some contexts. As mentioned, money laundering (avoiding tax or other legal requirements to move money) is also a crime.
Because “gas” is an informal and quicker way of saying gasoline that was adopted by the general public for convenience sake.
Language doesn’t exist to be technically correct, it exists to facilitate practical conversation. The more you look at it from this perspective the more things will start to make sense.
Huh yeah You made me interested enough to click on the Wikipedia article, and such drama behind it too apparently:
The term gasoline originated from the trademark terms Cazeline and Gazeline, which were stylized spellings and pronunciations of Cassell, the surname of British businessman John Cassell, who, on 27 November 1862, placed the following fuel-oil advertisement in The Times of London:
The Patent Cazeline Oil […]
That 19th-century advert is the earliest occurrence of Cassell’s trademark word, Cazelline, to identify automobile fuel. In the course of business, he learned that the Dublin shopkeeper Samuel Boyd was selling a counterfeit version of the fuel cazeline, and, in writing, Cassell asked Boyd to cease and desist selling fuel using his trademark. Boyd did not reply, and Cassell changed the spelling of the trademark name of his fuel cazelline by changing the initial letter C to the letter G, thus coining the word gazeline.
By 1863, North American English usage had re-spelled the word gazeline into the word gasolene, by 1864, the gasoline spelling was the common usage. In place of the word gasoline, most Commonwealth countries (except Canada), use the term “petrol”, and North Americans more often use “gas” in common parlance, hence the prevalence of the usage “gas bar” or “gas station” in Canada and the United States.
Coined from Medieval Latin, the word petroleum (L. petra, rock + oleum, oil) initially denoted types of mineral oil derived from rocks and stones. In Britain, Petrol was a refined mineral oil product marketed as a solvent from the 1870s by the British wholesaler Carless Refining and Marketing Ltd.
When Petrol found a later use as a motor fuel, Frederick Simms, an associate of Gottlieb Daimler, suggested to John Leonard, owner of Carless, that they trademark the word and uppercase spelling Petrol.
The trademark application was refused because petrol had already become an established general term for motor fuel. Due to the firm’s age, Carless retained the legal rights to the term and to the uppercase spelling of “Petrol” as the name of a petrochemical product.
It’s called petrol and benzin elsewhere in the world. Gas/gasoline is just a name for automobile fuel.
Btw, on the periodic table at room temperature and typical atmospheric conditions, gases are “fumes”, sure, but all of the first 72 elements are gaseous at 5000°C.
nostupidquestions
Oldest
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.