Unedited
11/1/09
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Hoarding

Hoarding is a moral term meaning taking more than one's fair share of goods. When a person hoards and at the same time is stingy about compensating the people and employees who enable the Hoarding this is called greed. Geed is a moral term not an ethical one but it is important to note its existence when doing a comprehensive ethical evaluation of a business.

Examples of Hoarding are seen in speculative buying of property and goods. This tends to drive up the price of property and goods costing the public more money for the basic necessities of life and lowering slightly the quality of their lives by denying them the satisfaction of finding affordable deals they can buy.

The Department of Commerce created the Internet domain name system. Google.com, Twitter.com and the like are domain names that were once freely available to buy on the Internet from domain name registrars. But savvy business investors quickly saw an opportunity to buy inexpensive domain names in bulk. So, it is not uncommon to find investors holding ten thousand domain names. More commonly people own a hundred to five hundred names. But there is little remedy to Hoarding except through windfall taxation that can fairly prevent Hoarding

Hoarding does not become an ethical issue until other questionable activities are present in the course of business. But the central ethical issues remain "how much wealth is really necessary?" Hoarding wealth leads to greater political power and effective means to successfully write legislation that more and more favors the wealthy. Hoarding is a problem that addresses arguments found in the social theory of Locke, Jeremy Bentham, Hobbs, and Rousseau.