Yesterday some dude posted a video to shame apparently Indian gas station owners charging $10 a gallon around the Hurricane Helene disaster area. The lolberts answered with rebuttals that free market pricing is the best rationing mechanism in a time of scarcity.
People are saying that the gas station could ration gallons per customer and keep the same price, and the lolberts are saying this is communist price control.
I'm not really sure how much merit is held by either position since I've never really thought about this with respect to a disaster area. Clearly the 1973 price controls were a bad idea, but this is a debate over what a private business owner should do after a hurricane. My gut feeling is that gas should be rationed by customer, not by pricing. But maybe the gas station is passing along supply chain pricing to a certain extent?
edit: Texas punished gas price gouging in 2019 after Hurricane Harvey.
I used to live in Florida, and I've been through a few hurricanes and the inevitable "Gas station price gouging?" headlines that followed. No investigation ever turned up anything. It's economics, and it's what you get when a city effectively attempts to transfer its gasoline reserves from gas stations to vehicles at a large scale and rapid pace.
I bet the same people who always equate price hikes to gouging are the same people who would have their families top off every vehicle parked at the same house, fill plastic bags with extra gas (yes, I've seen videos of people doing this), then use their precious gas to go on drivable roads for a post-storm sight seeing tour.
Its also always the people with cheap generators that burn a gallon+ per hour to keep their whole house turned on to return to their normal lives.