| I DDG searched "do economists support anti price gouging laws". Here's the top results. Every one of them disagrees with you. https://www.marketplace.org/2017/09/01/why-economists-dont-t...
"Economists don't think price gouging is a problem" https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffreydorfman/2016/09/23/price...
"Price gouging laws are good politics but bad economics" https://hbr.org/2013/07/the-problem-with-price-gouging-laws
"The problem with price gouging laws" https://www.thoughtco.com/the-economics-of-price-gouging-114...
supports price gouging Can you provide ANY literature suggesting mainstream economists, on average, support price fixing, confiscation, or purchase limits as a means to allocate resources effectively in a crisis? >The first army to learn to allocate supplies to the front lines on free market principles will be unstoppable! /s The military primarily gets work done by allowing private contractors to bid on projects. In order to get troops near the front lines, most military personnel take commercial airline flights to get there because it's more efficient. Military operations are wildly inefficient, but they still use markets wherever possible because it gets things done as efficiently as possible. |
If you think that, you must not have even read the links you gave me. The first one takes a turn halfway through with "but, as with so much of economics, there is disagreement," and has an economist outline a lot of the problems with price gouging that the other economists are missing.
> Can you provide ANY literature suggesting mainstream economists, on average, support price fixing, confiscation, or purchase limits as a means to allocate resources effectively in a crisis?
Frankly, I don't really care if "mainstream economists, on average" support anti-price gouging legislation or not. Like I alluded to before, they have their biases. For instance, they spend their careers focused on certain problems and not others. That doesn't mean those other problems are unimportant and can be ignored. Good policy will ignore economists in some cases, when factors economists de-prioritize need to be prioritized.
Your qualification of "mainstream" is also kinda interesting. I don't consider economics to be any kind of settled science. It's almost certain that there are serious problems caused by following "mainstream economics" due to its flaws, omissions, and biases. Its ideas should be given due weight, but they're not the gospel truth. That's especially clear on the question of price gouging, because even in the survey you cited there were economists that strongly supported efforts to curb it.
>>> It doesn't matter where you go, everywhere you will see markets are better at allocating resources.
>> The first army to learn to allocate supplies to the front lines on free market principles will be unstoppable! /s
> The military primarily gets work done by allowing private contractors to bid on projects.
That's clearly not what I was talking about. If, as you say, "markets are better at allocating resources" everywhere, don't you think a front line army unit should get supplies allocated to it based on market principles (e.g. the unit bids against other units in a market to get more ammunition)?