| >...There are tons of people out there who will handle these things for their communities without expecting an exorbitant amount of money. The article I linked too was the personal experience of an economist who was in Raleigh after a hurricane hit the area. As he writes: >...The problem for Raleigh residents was all about price, at that point. The prices of all the necessities that I wanted to use to “preserve, protect, or sustain” my own life shot up to infinity. Within a day after the storm, there were no generators, ice, or chain saws to be had, none. But that means that anyone who brought these commodities into the crippled city, and charged less than infinity, would be doing us a service. There were not tons of people bringing supplies into the city. The state had to actually beg other states and the federal government for supplies. In the long run, high profits during a shortage also mean that suppliers in general will be incentivized to keep a larger stockpile of things that have a good shelf-life since they know they will be able to make good money the next time there is a shortage (more than the storage costs). If you are going to literally make it illegal to try this, then you better have a government be willing to spend its tax dollars on creating a stockpile rather than spending money on more immediate things that are more likely to get votes. (We've now seen that all the talk of the national stockpile the federal government supposedly had was greatly exaggerated.) For these reasons, a majority of economists are opposed to 'price gouging' laws. For example see http://www.igmchicago.org/surveys/price-gouging/ |