So either you have hoarding or you have price gouging. This isn't a natural inevitability, it is specifically tied to markets. In extreme situations like natura

So either you have hoarding or you have price gouging. This isn't a natural inevitability, it is specifically tied to markets. In extreme situations like natural disasters, markets behave in this way. So some people blame price gougers, and others consider it the only reasonable thing to do. I think we should consider such extreme situations as evidence of the limits of markets for distribution. There are other ways to distribute goods and they may very well be superior in such situations. However, it is completely untenable because markets are politically inviolable these days. Even if you want to stop something you consider perverse (price gouging), you have to do it with a market mechanism (price controls), but this is a failure mode of markets, not something you can band-aid while staying within markets. And to emphasize the point: It isn't worthwhile to consider gouging a moral failure on the part of individual actors. Either they do it, or someone else hoards. You can call both despicable but that doesn't fix the economic pathology. Focusing on individual actions blinds one to the setting in which they take those actions.