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.
This is the issue. Either there's a moral code we all subscribe to or there isn't. The law is a poor substitute, as it's written by the wealthy and powerful, which is why a lot of immoral behavior that those in power do isn't criminalized (predatory lending, rent seeking, Congress trading stocks with advance knowledge of legislation, etc.).
This circles back around to small government, smaller states, and high trust populations. If you are a moral people with a small enough population, you can subsist with a smaller government because the people treat each other like an extended genetic family. This falls apart the moment it scales large enough to introduce “diversity”, and then you need draconian government to migrate the inevitable racial/ethnic strife.