[mschuster91]

> The best known way to allocate meager resources for best possible use is not to interfere with the free market. And anybody who disagrees and tries to do otherwise will learn this fundamental the hard way.

The "free market" is a bad idea in scarcity times, as the only ones able to pay the profiteering prices will be the rich and wasteful, and ordinary society is left behind. Just look at the PC market where shitcoin miners have completely ruined the supply chain - it's still almost impossible to get decent GPUs at a decent price point after years, and there have been serious though temporary impacts on deliverability of RAM and HDDs with other shitcoins. Or with rental markets where entire city quarters are either taken over by AirBnB-style operations (because ultra-short-term "hotel" rental yields sometimes up to 4x a month what regular renting would allow) or left idle as "speculative" assets (e.g. Londongrad).

To make it worse, when scalpers buy up the remains of the available inventory, that inventory gets locked away from being used productively by anyone as scalpers have an incentive to keep their inventory off the market to drive up the price even more!

In times of resource scarcity - no matter if food or anything else that's critical for society - a good government steps in and limits the free market (e.g. by banning cryptocurrencies or scalpers, by introducing quotas or by introducing vacancy taxes) so that at least some movement of goods happens.