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In the UK there is talk of a strike in the uniuon of workers who deliver petrol to garages.  If negotiations fail, there will have to be a week's notice of a strike and there a week of legal shenanigans to be done first.  Once a strike starts, its estimated that there is 2 weeks resilience in the system and the army has trained replacement drivers.  Nothing to worry about - right?  If everything goes wrong, its 4 weeks before we start to run out of fuel

A government minister half-heartedly said "Fill your tanks next time you are at a garage instead of the usual £10 people spend.  Bring a jerry can along and fill that too."

Lo and behold, panic ensures.  I've spent 45 minutes in a traffic jam caused by cars queuing for petrol.  It appears that every garage in the country is besieged by motorists with jerry cans.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2121984/Fuel-shortages-Police-shut-garages-profiteers-look-cash-chaos.html

How does this happen?  How does a peaceful country with no real problems turn into a land of panic stricken people who queue for hours for something that might run out in a month?  I feel like I'm watching people having a collective brain seizure.

Just imagine if it was bank tellers. "Take out a little extra the next time you stop by the bank, you may want to pull some of your savings out too."

The authors of The Invisible Gorilla (http://www.theinvisiblegorilla.com) book are scientists who answer this very question. Wholeheartedly recommend everyone to read this book. IMHO it is necessary for everyone to overcome described illusions to move forward as a whole civilization.

It happens because people like you fail to see the violence of the state.

The UK is a democracy.  State violence is done at the will of the people who vote.  In this case, you are trolling and luckily people don't vote for trolls to be shot at dawn. 

I actually agree with him. Democracy by definition is mob rule, exactly the type of government where you would most likely see trolls shot at dawn, and personally I think you classify xD -  Also if you aren't aware there is actually a Monarchy in the UK.

I know.  And they love it.  As a republican, I disagree with it but the Brits love their pageantry and the soap opera of the royal family.

in qld, australia a year ago we had a bit of a flood... for the majority of city-dwellers it was but a mere inconvenience and not really much to worry about... yet everyone went to the supermarket in a panic and emptied the shelves... i remember there being basically being no bottled water or bread or milk like it was armageddon. i guess if i were shopping for canned tuna that would have been sold out too.

of course 2 days later most people's lives were completely back to normal.

Well, that's a over-generalization. A lot of people hate those moochers, myself included.

The problem here is the strikers, they already get great pay (when was the last time you saw poorly paid workers go on strike?) They should all get the chop.

All the local filling stations are now out of petrol and diesel because there has been so much panic buying.  There are no strikers.  There is no strike.  The problem is that people have entered some kind of panic mode.

It seems the fear of a problem creates the exact problem of which people are afraid.

There isn't a better alternative so saying democracy isn't perfect is not really more useful than complaining about the weather.

I like a Constitutional Republic myself.

The alternative is: don't use violence. It's pretty simple.

Poor people? no problem, just use violence to help them.

Sick people? no problem, just use violence to help them.

Violence being used? no problem, just use violence to help them.

All state solutions to problems are based on using a gun. Don't say there are no alternatives, because society uses voluntary interactions to solve problems all the time. aka the market.

How will people get food if the government didn't run the farms and shops? Oh wait... they don't and yet we have food. Impossible!!!

You can't have a free market without a state.  So what is the point you are making?

Umm... you can't have a free market WITH a state, by definition.

The point I'm making is: stop sanctioning the institutionalised violence that is the state.

It only exists because you, and most others, falsely believe it's necessary. It's an epidemic of Stockholm syndrome.

If you dont allow strikes, then other more damaging forms of economic warfare will happen, like sabotage. That in turn imposes costs on an employer because he has to have guards and an internal police force to protect the business from sabotage.

Strikes are a controlled and peaceful form of economic warfare. Its a reasonable and legitimate part of the price discovery mechanism.

You have no idea what a free market is.  

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_market

"..even the ostensibly freest markets require a state to exercise coercive power in some areas - to enforce contracts, to govern the formation of labor unions, to spell out the rights and obligations of corporations, to shape who has standing to bring legal actions, to define what constitutes an unacceptable conflict of interest, etc."

Without a state, you own nothing - you simply possess things.  You can't sell the possessions unless you have more firepower than the person who would buy them.  A state with the concept of legal ownership makes possible the concept of a free market where prices are determined by supply and demand.

Any organization with sufficient (fire)power to enforce contracts between their members is a "state" then? That isn't a bad definition.

So, technically you can have a free market with self-government.  But since like 99% of people don't subscribe to the concept of self-government, the 1% that do would probably end up forming some sort of self-defense force that would probably be considered a government.  Is that a state?  I dunno...

No - firepower is necessary but not sufficient.

I can't drive so I don't much care.
And it's not true either - it's an 'everybody panic, life is rubbish isn't it even though we worked so hard to achieve our lower middle class (despite no real education) lifestyle' article in the Daily Mail once again. 
I personally prefer to look on the bright side of life and just let my dog use the Daily Mail to do his business.

It was true.  Even if you can't drive, you can walk to a garage and check if they ran out of petrol and diesel.  The ones around me did.

And for non-UK people, the strike never happened.  All that panic was for nothing.

To get back to the OP. People are very irrational regardless of how they see themselves. I think the best story from the petrol strike fiasco was the woman managing to set herself on fire and it made me laugh considerably. Not only did she buy into the whole strike nonsense, she thought it would be a good idea to bring her petrol into the kitchen, try and fill a plastic bottle from a jug next to an open flame hob. To make it even funnier, David Cameron had to make some sort of apologetic gesture on TV despite it being her fault for lacking even the most basic common sense.