Prices don’t just discriminate between rich and poor, they discriminate between desperate needs and casual wants. Everyone agrees it’s a good thing for the poor to have access to things they desperately need, but price controls also ensure that wealthy people can buy lots of the available supply on a whim. Someone with a mold remediation business might be willing to stockpile thousands of N95’s if available at pre-COVID prices — storage is cheap, and they’ll be used eventually. But if they’re being sold at a 5x the normal price, they’re motivated to stretch their current supply through re-use and buy only what they immediately need.
That’s why price controls and rationing should always happen at the same time, and the severity of price controls is constrained by the effectiveness of rationing. If you can easily defeat rationing (e.g. ordering from multiple online stores) it’s as though it doesn’t exist. In those cases, market prices make more sense for ensuring availability.
Honestly, large manufacturers/retailers are probably the least likely to price gouge because, laws aside, any extra profit that, say, Home Depot can make by selling snow shovels for $50 before an unexpected early blizzard is 1.) Trivial for their overall bottom line and 2.) Likely to result in a very expensive reputational hit.
You also hoard whenever goods have storage costs associated with them and you have excess capacity. Hoarding is how you collect rent on your grain silos, warehouses, freezers, oil tanks, etc. You either hoard yourself, or you contract out the capacity to others who want to speculate without the capital expense of building their own storage.
For example, why don't we have shortages of beef and chicken, while fish are threatened with extinction?
For another, during the California and Yukon gold rushes, men rushed to the gold fields. Women rushed, too, but not to mine the earth for gold, but to mine the men for their gold.
My friend finally said you don't understand. I don't care what you have to do to get crème brûlée, and I will pay for it.
The waiter said I understand, and shortly came back with crème brûlée. He had ordered it from another restaurant and hired a taxi to go get it.
The waiter got a nice tip, and my friend's date enjoyed crème brûlée for dessert. Everyone was happy.
And that's how "shortages" work in the free market.
All the anecdotes about going down the street for homely puddings, have little to do with the larger markets in the modern world.
There are no shortages in free markets.
Perhaps your point is that, on a free market, the supply and demand will always meet at the right price point. Yes, that works long-term. Short-term, it doesn't, because sellers have every reason to look at the first and second derivative of the price - to hold off selling until they believe the demand for a product is about to reach its peak - and only then actually sell out their supply. This of course will cause the prices to go down, but by that time, the emergency may just be over, and a lot of people who needed the product then will have suffered and/or died.
The way I see it, this is literally the same mechanism stock trading is based on, and yet nobody here seems to have a problem understanding it there. Supply and demand, right? So if I know the demand tomorrow will be larger than today, I'll hold off selling my stocks, and I'll hold them until the point I see demand starting to fall back down.
Of course it does.
> hold off selling until they believe the demand for a product is about to reach its peak
Of course, people famously are unable to correctly predict when that peak is, and so your scenario will never happen. (Some will sell early, some late.)
If you're good at predicting stock prices better than everyone else who is trying to, you can make a billion in short order. Good luck!
Because farmers can easily breed beef and chicken; fishermen cannot easily breed their own fish - the fish have a nasty habit of not respecting imaginary property lines in water, and you can't just put fences in an ocean.
It's worth noting that the free market is precisely why fish are threatened with extinction. It's a textbook tragedy of the commons, for which the solution is regulatory in nature.
Fish farms are a real (and growing) thing.
> Fish farms are a real (and growing) thing.
Glad to hear that. This will enable the free market to work properly in this space.
The advantage of having higher prices is that only people who REALLY need an article will buy it, so limited supplies will go to them.
For instance, if FFP2 masks are in a limited supply and cost $0.01 each, then everyone is going to try to buy in lots of 1000, and they will run out immediately, with the supply going to random people who probably will not even use most of them.
But if FFP2 masks cost $100 each, then people will buy and use them only when strictly needed, and they will be available for those who absolutely need them and are thus willing to pay any amount of money.
The only problems are:
- People who irrationally try to price gouge when the price is already correct, costing themselves money and making the article unavailable
- The potential inability of people who are highly needy to obtain loans or have sufficient basic income to purchase high-priced supplies
The former is fixed by providing the forecasts that are used to set prices, thus providing a credible insight that there will be no shortage at current prices, while the latter by having better ways of ensuring that loans are repaid and generally making it easier to give out loans.
Take toilet paper; people hoarded it, because it wasn't more expensive than normal and people feared they wouldn't be able to buy more in the future.
If the price went up, people might only buy what they need, because there is an extra cost to buying more than you need now, when the price might return to normal in the future.
It's that they sell out, and no one can buy any.
But I believe the free market will handle it best.
It doesn't help the world at all if only rich people are able to afford certain things like disinfectant and PPE; the virus is far more effectively controlled if everyone, no matter their socioeconomic class, has access to these things.