Scalpers only do (2) for those who can afford it. If scalpers were willing to hand out goods on the merit of the application rather than profit then I’d have much more sympathy. But then they wouldn’t really be scalpers anymore.

I’m willing to bet that scalpers starve critical applications of goods far more than they provide them. Providers of critical services are usually poorly funded.

Or maybe they are price sensitive but the goods are just worth more to them.

The scalper can't distinguish between a poorer person who really needs a thing, and a richer person who just kinda wants it. They will happily price out the former before the latter gives up.

There seems to be an assumption in the discussions about the market that people don't do stupid shit with money. That the same good cannot be both life-critical for one, and a source of cheap entertainment for another. That people only ever spend money to make more money. That they are perfectly consistent over time. That nothing is ever time-critical, it may be only time-discounted.

But the reality is, people are irrational, things take time, and markets have inertia. In a scalper-managed shortage of critical medication, it's perfectly possible for a rich person who watched one too many end-of-the-world movies to buy up the supply at high markup, to stock their fallout shelter, and have it rot there while people who need it die. It takes time for a chip scalper to insert themselves into the market, buy up the supply and advertise their existence - in that time, the factories might be wasting megadollars of money.