Being lucky enough to be first in the queue doesn't make you more morally deserving any more than being lucky enough to be rich. Worse, making it illegal to rai

Being lucky enough to be first in the queue doesn't make you more morally deserving any more than being lucky enough to be rich. Worse, making it illegal to raise prices constrains supply so that a lot fewer people can be helped. I'm not saying that absolutely everything should necessarily be allocated by price. Making it illegal to allocate things by price makes sense in the case of something like land whose supply is inelastic. If you want to say the price of land should be controlled and nobody should be allowed more than their fair share, okay; it's not like a price increase will allow more to be supplied. But clean water and airline seats have an elastic supply, and outlawing allocation by price means there will be less to go around.