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.
It's going to run out anyway if you keep the price, preventing those stations from bidding for more up the supply chain, naturally further limiting supplies by stopping the pricing signal in its tracks.
Sowell's Basic Economics talks about this phenomenon. "Profit is the price paid for efficiency."
This is correct when there is a competitive marketplace, but immediately after a natural disaster there is no economy.
As a customer, in many cases you can't even get to another gas station because the roads are blocked or you may have two choices instead of 100. As a station owner it's not about bidding for supply chain, it's whether the truck can get to you. Charging $50 a gallon will result in 'efficiency' of flying in gasoline to power a mansion's 10 gallon an hour generator, but not the efficiency of restoring order as quickly as possible.
Market efficiency takes time to achieve. It derives from things like word of mouth, you complain about grocery costs and your friend says hey that supermarket twice as far from you is cheaper, you start going there and eventually your local one lowers prices or goes out of business.
Finding an efficient market takes longer after a natural disaster and so wastes more than just fixing the infrastructure.
Your first sentence is absurd beyond conception: an economy is the conceptualized aggregate of exchanges. Are you saying that after a catastrophe, humans no longer need or want? Of course we do and the natural and normal homo sapien way to address want and need is to share among our own and trade with the others.
Also hahaha good luck w that logic when your bills for that month arrive.