From Loyola University:
Many governments have condemned the practice of “hoarding”—particularly when it comes to “essential” commodities like food. Anti-hoarding laws have been fairly common in recent times in poor countries like India, and such laws were equally pervasive in ancient times.1
While these laws are ubiquitous, it is difficult to define “hoarding” in a meaningful and precise way, and it is also hard to justify rules against hoarding (how ever defined) on efficiency or social welfare grounds. Yet, scholars regularly refer to “anti-hoarding laws” as though it were obvious what is meant, and most of these scholars (including some economist s) just assume, without any analysis or justification, that these laws make sense.2
Conventional scholarly treatments of anti-hoarding legislation thus fail to deal with three difficult questions—one definitional, one descriptive, and one normative in character. Definitionally, precisely which activities do anti-hoarding laws seek to prevent? Descriptively, which group(s) within a society would favor such laws? And normatively, what is the effect of such laws on social welfare?(15page PDF)
This article seeks to answer these questions by closely analyzing one of the first recorded instances of anti-hoarding regulation, the Babylonian Talmud ’s ban on the hoarding of fruit and other essential commodities.
