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."
What does Sowell say about people existing in a breakdown of law and order deciding it's "cheaper" to kill the gas station owner and take the gas instead of paying his asking price? Surely that newfound substitution effect must have some impact on prices.
Then gas price rises off the chart, because no more is being extracted and produced. If it's only localized breakdown, then wider society should seek feasible punishment or ostracize. Many societal evils stem from deciding homeless, disabled, etc have a positive right to live. Rational people are more incentivized to protect or avenge the shopkeeper if they fear utter isolation of their community from prodctive society.
It's already not getting there. If you want to argue that the only thing preventing gas tankers from being helicoptered in is the existence of "price gouging" laws then feel free to make that argument.
What if they don't fear "utter isolation of their community"? Laws against "price gouging" in times of natural disaster are reasonably popular, which is why they also exist in Red states. What then incentivizes the "rational people" to protect or avenge the shopkeeper? It's doubtful he possesses some particular skill in obtaining gasoline that others lack.
The arguments against many forms of democracy apply when populism devolves to tyrannical mob rule. If it's a bunch of people being NPCs who vote emotionally or tribalistically when their state ballot comes in, all sorts of nasty unintended consequences result from feel good laws. If it's local government, at least some negotiation is going on, and the voting party will revoke such superstitious law if and when resource providers choose more profitable communities, or neighbors leave when they can't access said resource.
My prior argument takes for granted that a functional, somewhat decentralized society will have contracts in place or otherwise be indoctrinated with the importance of vigilantly upholding property rights (within reason, we're talking a person owning a single gas station, not an entire city) and freedom of association. That takes precedence over the regular person's proclivity to economic and sociological illiteracy. The rational person realizes that 5 of them need to stick their necks out to dissuade the mob of 50 idiots, that didnt ration or negogiate in advance, from repercussions if they go ahead with pitchforks. If there are no repercussions, then that means the cyclical theory of civilizational collapse is gradually underway.