Free market solutions break down when demand AND SUPPLY are BOTH inelastic, and that's only if you count 'price goes up' as market failure. Think of it this way - the demand for food is inelastic. Does this mean free market solutions for food have broken down?

Governments preventing price increases just means that supply doesn't increase nearly as quickly as it would otherwise.

Letting masks sell for $25 a pop so that companies are incentivized to build infrastructure to churn them out at an optimal rate 6 months from now just doesn't seem like a realistic solution

Letting masks sell for $25/ct now so that companies can afford to go to 24/7 production NOW and not have to worry about paying unemployment in 2 months might be, though.

> The root of the problem is supply, so stop the government intervention and you pay more money for the same problems.

The company in the article is closed on nights and weekends. Don't you think there's a price at which they'd stay open, thus increasing supply?

You literally cannot scale up the production of the underlying fabric that goes into N95 masks quickly. These assembly lines take 6 months to set up.

There is no price at which these masks can be sold which will meaningfully impact supply before Covid 19 burns itself out.

Such price increases are honestly more likely to incentivize people digging their P100 masks out of their garages and workshops and donating those.

They're closed on weekends and nights. The number of machines isn't what's keeping their production capacity down.

And this factory makes surgical masks, not N95s. The material is not a bottleneck as far as I'm aware.