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.
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".