I’m decidedly not in the camp who believe that the free market will magically solve everything. However, there is a big difference between needing disaster supp

I’m decidedly not in the camp who believe that the free market will magically solve everything. However, there is a big difference between needing disaster supplies immediately and the long-term stable markets for food and housing. The difference is time, how fast the demand changes. The arguments in favor of no regulation are that supply and demand will eventually balance at the place that is “optimal”, or least bad for everyone. Healthcare is and always will be especially problematic for dogmatic proponents of free market policy, but food in general seems to work reasonably well because the overall demand doesn’t change suddenly or dramatically. With today’s need for disaster supplies, demand is many orders of magnitude higher than normal, and by the time supply can meet the demand, the demand is going to disappear. Price gouging of emergency supplies in this case is taking advantage of a huge discrepancy between demand and supply, and this discrepancy doesn’t exist globally for food & housing - it might vary locally, but there’s almost unlimited amounts of competition, unlike N95 mask production. So that’s why it might not be so inconsistent to be okay with making food profits but not with disaster supply price gouging.