I went to dinner once with friends. One friend asked his date what she'd like for dessert. She said crème brûlée. He called the waiter over, and said please get some for her. The waiter said they didn't have crème brûlée. My friend said, you don't understand, she wants crème brûlée, and I'll pay for it. The waiter reiterated that they didn't have crème brûlée and couldn't get it.

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.

In the modern world, there's just one source of many products. All the jeans in the world, from Korea. All the memory chips from a few factories.

All the anecdotes about going down the street for homely puddings, have little to do with the larger markets in the modern world.

And yet the only time we have shortages is when the government steps in and fixes the price and/or the supply.

Completely false and deliberately argumentative. Try harder.

The demand for yachts at 1$ apiece will always outstrip supply. Do we have a yacht shortage then? No, because yachts cost much more than 1$ apiece.

There are no shortages in free markets.

That's getting absurd. The supply of a widget that I just made of paperclip at $1M apiece will never outstrip supply, even though there's just one of such widgets, because there's exactly zero demand at that price. You can define any shortage out of existence this way.

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.

> Short-term, it doesn't,

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!