Don't high price signals in an efficient market serve the community by increasing supply? It's hard to argue that there's a better way to do it that doesn't inadvertently decrease the supply and instead become a lottery
I think this would rely on an assumption that there is always supply available to draw on.
At some point there is no supply to alleviate the problem. Some effects may be dampened by new ride share drivers signing up, but even then, not everyone wants to be a driver regardless of compensation.
I don’t know of a good approach to free-market around a supply limitation in the short-term.
Prices cannot solve all supply problems. We cannot have 2 million teenagers dating the starlet-du-jour. But prices typically can increase the supply quite a bit, while most techniques that avoid prices will not increase supply at all.
So if the goal is to maximize how many people get what they want, prices, plus some mechanism to avoid temporal speculation (for instance someone saving their sealed pokemon cards for 20 years hoping for price increases) makes the most sense.
That's unlikely for sudden and short-lived surges, isn't it? There probably won't be plenty of new rentals popping up in LA because of potentially high demand during the next wildfire.
At some point there is no supply to alleviate the problem. Some effects may be dampened by new ride share drivers signing up, but even then, not everyone wants to be a driver regardless of compensation.
I don’t know of a good approach to free-market around a supply limitation in the short-term.