The coronavirus task force has talked somewhat candidly about why the centralized monopsony buyer has been a problem. Because everyone is lying. A hospital mi

The coronavirus task force has talked somewhat candidly about why the centralized monopsony buyer has been a problem. Because everyone is lying. A hospital might really need 100k masks, but they ask for 500k because they're afraid there won't be any more in the future. NYC demanded 40k ventilators, but it turns out they needed I think less than 10k. Multiply this by every hospital in every municipality across the country. There's no way a hand full of bureaucrats in Washington could make sense of that in reasonable time. I understand why pricing feels cruel, but it's a better system at more efficiently allocating resources. Anyone with some money can allocate some masks to a place with need that's in their line of sight. This provides much better coverage than the central planning models of: price controls, purchase limits, and confiscation/redistribution.