[PollardsRho]

It's wonderfully idealistic to believe that the people who would pay $10 a gallon for gas are the people that needed it the most and not just the people with the most disposable income. I've known people who would happily pay $10 a gallon for gas they could have easily avoided using because it's pocket change to them, and similarly people who wouldn't buy it for essentially any reason.

Additionally so to believe that the government will hand out money so responsively in reaction to natural disasters that there's no reason to limit price gouging as a way of more effectively making sure poor people can buy food immediately after a hurricane. The government can't be trusted to set prices, but can be trusted to give everyone cash immediately after a hurricane knocks out the major road?

There are no good ways to allocate limited resources in the aftermath of natural disasters or similar acute supply shocks. Setting per-party quotas on buying toilet paper isn't perfectly fair, as the article points out, but to me it seems an awful lot more fair than "the rich get everything." As a limited, temporary amelioration of the kind of naked greed that the article admits most people find repugnant, in situations that are rare and have limited impact on the functioning of normal markets, it seems like common sense.

[Bostonian]

$10 gas encourages people to economize, for example by having the family evacuate in the smaller rather than the larger car. Prices send valuable signals, and price controls destroy that information.