Gas Pains...

Maryland has been putting the smackdown on gas price competition. They have a law that it's illegal to sell gas below cost, and it appears they are starting to enforce it against some stations in Westminster, MD that are engaging in a price war.

I don't really have anything better to say that what Todd at Volokh stated, as well as the Walter Williams article he linked that asks the all important question Do you suppose that Maryland enacted its gasoline minimum-price law because irate customers complained to the state legislature that gasoline prices were too low?

I did, at one point, have a lot to say on this subject. When I was a senior in college, for a second-semester Business and Government economics class, we had to write a paper. One of the possible things we could do was critique a law. This was in 2001, when the minimum-gas price law was just passed. The paper is here (or here if you prefer the fancy formatting of MS Word).

I do love Todd's summary of Maryland politics:
Maryland, which appears to have never met an ill-considered anticompetitive regulation that it didn't like..