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.
People were unable to ration ahead of time because of the biggest limited resource of all, time. This is especially a problem in areas that don't get hurricanes regularly, because they don't have full storages setup prior and by the time they know to need it, everyone else also does, and then need dozens of different things to survive (gas is the bottom of that list for anyone with a brain).
Every major hurricane has mile long lines at every single gas station for days. Which means you need someone with no job to sit in that line and hope that they get there before it runs out.
If you physically ration it, then you waste a large amount of time arguing with people who will fight and push against it all day which limits the amount of people who get gas. If you price raise it, then people are forced to ration themselves and get out faster, which increases the amount of gas that goes around.
While also maintaining the gas station's profit margin to keep it open. Because they will absolutely be taking huge losses on Day 2 when they have no fucking gas left and nobody is coming by for anything else because they are locked in their house. That big injection gets bled out for days until life returns to normal and the supply chain gets sorted and they make a much smaller profit, if any at all.
Again, its a complex issue with a lot going on that is a lot bigger than "those fucking Indians are screwing us!" and "lolberts."
Gas, unlike food and water and supplies, also has a very short shelf life. Even with stabilizer it's probably going bad after six months and is bad after a year.
This exact thing happened after the Sandy Hook fake ammo shortage. Retired faggot Boomers would camp at Walmart and literally dump the shelf in their cart when it stocked and immediately resell it for 4x the cost.
They introduced zero value to the system. They didn't facilitate distribution, they didn't increase the supply of ammo.
These behaviors made it worse because the perception of a shortage made everybody want to buy more than they normally would because "I might not be able to get some later".