> Let me reframe is this way: There is some emergency wage where his employees would enthusiastically work substantially more than they are right now. There's some price-per-mask where the owner would enthusiastically pay them that wage to get extra masks out of the factory. That price-per-mask would still count as a steal compared to the cost of a healthcare worker developing COVID-19. Everyone would be better off if hospitals were paying that price. So why aren't they?

Because your analysis is wrong? You seem be assuming workers are some kind of machine that turns wages into output, and the more wages you put in, the more output you get, and you can freely adjust output by adjusting wages. You also seem to thing he has a lot of pricing flexibility due to the demand. I think those ideas have several problems:

1. There's an obvious limit to individual output, and his existing employees are probably operating close to that, especially since his business was already under stress.

2. Human psychology is complicated, and you're ignoring morale. A logical robot might have the same satisfaction with a certain wage before and after he's made much more than that, but a human probably won't (and that's even an oversimplification).

3. His customers are probably going be unhappy with him for raising prices in a crisis, regardless if he had good reasons for it or not. He's already dealing with the problem of customers leaving after a crisis for cheaper competitors, and a price increase now would probably make that problem even worse.