Hoarding resources that we aren't globally in short of, actually makes the situation far worse. The demand spike is solely caused by hoarders and price gougers, to the detriment of everybody else.
Anti-gouging laws mean that you'll either do without or pay even higher prices for black market goods. The more you punish black marketeers, the higher go the prices you'll have to pay.
There are when a bunch of people buy up the entire supply, and try to resell it at 5x the rate.
> Gouging disincentivizes hoarding.
Only after the gougers have hoarded everything they can.
The gougers in this case aren't making any more toilet paper appear in the world. The factories aren't making more of it, just because a few people bought it out, because the global demand for it is constant. They simply created an artificial shortage, and introduced themselves as a parasitic middleman.
Things don't happen in a vacuum. If the gougers create an artificial shortage, then there is money to be made by increasing the supply. In fact, there'll be plenty of money to be made selling to the would-be gougers. The supply is not fixed and gouging will increase the supply.
1. The absolute supply of toilet paper on a long-term timescale will not increase.
2. The cost of increasing manufacturing capacity may not be worth the increased revenues from selling into a two-week shortage.
3. There's a lag time. By the time you increasing manufacturing capacity, and get paper into groceries, the demand curve would have flattened out.
4. There isn't an actual shortage, there are some very localized shortages, which will get smoothed out once supplies sitting in warehouses get to store shelves. Nobody in Mexico increases toilet paper manufacturing capacity because the corner store across my apartment is out. Nobody working in grocery logistics is going to be calling people in to work overtime to deal with this, either.
* 100 rolls of toilet paper sold to whoever comes first
* 100 rolls of toiler paper sold to whoever bids highest
The point is, gouging creates MORE availability. Remember those hurricanes? People outside the devastated zones promptly filled jerry cans with gas, drove into the disaster area, and sold gas out of the back of their pickup trucks for high prices.
That is, until the government made it illegal to do that. The next disaster meant people had no gas until the government got around (days later) to bringing some in and rationing it.
TP is not quite the inelastic situation you posit it is. For example, there's been a boom in sales of bidet toilet attachments. High prices for tp make it very attractive to switch, thus making tp available for others. High prices mean people who already have more tp than they need will be tempted to sell it. High prices mean TP makers will ramp up production as fast as possible. High prices mean people will be motivated to make & sell TP alternatives. High prices mean people have no reason to hoard TP.
Anti-gouge laws lead directly to hoarding and no TP available.
Higher profits from gouging is what motivates people to increase the supply. Altruism only goes so far. Profit motive to provide needed supplies is far more effective.
Remove the profit motive, relying on the government and altruism, is a very poor substitute.