For a disposable item like face masks, consumers would gladly pay 3x the pre-pandemic mask prices for their own personal use. The buyers who aren’t willing to p

For a disposable item like face masks, consumers would gladly pay 3x the pre-pandemic mask prices for their own personal use. The buyers who aren’t willing to pay 3x are hoarders and resellers, because there’s no guarantee enough people will pay 5x or 6x for it to be worth it. If the manufacturer prices are allowed to rise, the profits incentivize increased manufacturing. If the prices aren’t allowed to rise, the rationally selfish strategy is to hoard the entire stock of any non-gouging manufacturer and sell the product on a gray market like Amazon where anti-gouging rules are poorly enforced. The profits obtained by resellers could have instead gone to manufacturers, encouraging more people to become manufacturers until prices return to normal. Nobody wants masks to be unavailable to the poor. The disagreement is what measures will best make them available to everyone, the poor included. It’s reasonable for people to disagree on whether relaxing price controls would achieve this end. But to say that free-market advocates believe the poor “don’t deserve” access to masks is as disingenuous as saying anti-gouging advocates believe the public “deserves shortages”, or that people who aren’t tenacious enough to find masks at any price in a hoarding-dominated environment deserve to die. Any sane person acknowledges both solutions have major drawbacks.