> I will bet you any amount of money that the people who need to physically work, and therefore trivially the ones most in need of good masks, aren't the ones b

> I will bet you any amount of money that the people who need to physically work, and therefore trivially the ones most in need of good masks, aren't the ones buying them at free-market rates. As the covid19 pandemic showed, they surely are not the ones buying them all all at artificially restricted prices either, because the jackass with the shopping carts and the desperate need to hoard all types of basics decided to clean up the inventory. > Econ 101 doesn't talk much about the impact of wealth inequality on free-market mechanisms, for some reason. As much as it might pain you, basic economy principles are a kin to natural laws, in the sense that even if you try your hardest to pretend they don't exist... They are always there. Additionally, one of the main errors you're making is conflating how economies work with your personal opinion on how you preferred things to happen without paying any attention to unintended consequences, let alone basic relationships between cause and effect.