It's the root of conspiracy theories - it's much easier and nicer to think there's some cartoon villain somewhere making your life miserable; it's much harder to admit that the world is just annoying and painful.

Also with a "big evil" you can tell yourself that removing that evil would solve everything.

A lot of times, the villainy is really the collective self-interest of thousand of people in a supply chain or open market. No one is going to willingly pay more or sell for less than they can get at any step of the way.

I use housing as a good example since it's been a major driver of inflation and most houses are sold peer to peer on the open market. If you're selling your house and you see comparable houses selling for $900K, but you only need $750K to earn enough profit to buy your next house, what are you going to do? Sell for the lowest price you can afford? Or sell for the highest price you can get? You'd sell for the highest price. And that same calculation gets played out at every level of every transaction in every corner of the global marketplace. Yet nobody would think of themselves as being a villain for doing it. Or be accused of gouging.

From that comes NIMBY; everyone agrees that something should be done but nobody wants to do it. We really don't like be presented with 'we cause things too.'

The house sale is a perfect example, and is something to meditate on. (One solution is 'competition' such as making sure new houses are being built, other companies can produce food, etc.)

I see a lot of millenial/gen z commenters complaining that the previous generations were able to build wealth by buying affordable homes and watching them appreciate faster than inflation. And they want in on the same deal. It's simply not possible. For one, we haven't built housing to keep pace with population growth which skews supply and demand. NIMBYs are a big reason why. Secondly, in order for a home to be a valuable investment, it must by definition become less affordable for the next generation. Otherwise, it's not increasing the wealth of the owner. The only sustainable option is to match supply to demand such that houses pace or even lag inflation which makes them no longer be a viable store of wealth and instead remain affordable and available to everyone. The Boomers got a sweet deal and realistically, no one should ever get that deal again.

Well, also, we know from behavioral economics that people behave their most irrationally when they try to perceive value.

When a store runs out of flour, people don't get as mad at the store as if they raised the prices but keeps flour on the shelf. Despite the fact that having an expensive option for flour always leaves you better off than having no option.

After Hurricane Katrina there were some prominent examples of people being arrested under anti-scalping laws for trying to haul in food and generators from other areas to sell.

It's always the case. Someone, somewhere, is taking the opportunity to put prices up. It might be in some cases that it's triggered by a shortage, but they're still putting prices up because they can.