>The best thing to do is to let the market forces work rather than placing a limit. Free markets, to paraphrase a famous saying about the US Constitution, are

>The best thing to do is to let the market forces work rather than placing a limit. Free markets, to paraphrase a famous saying about the US Constitution, are not a suicide pact. Price controls alone will increase demand, and therefore some other method of rationing has to be planned and substituted. I agree politicians are dangerous to the extent they do not grapple with this. Nobody wants to have allocation based on how long you can wait in line or how politically connected you are, like the stereotype of the Soviet Union. But even the capitalist democracies had rationing systems during WWII. Markets are optimizing machines, and like every optimizing contraption, human beings get to set them up and determine the boundary conditions. In extreme conditions, people without much money get a disproportionate amount of utility from essentials, compared with people who have a lot. Nothing about a "free" market necessarily entails a guard rail preventing millions of people falling beneath a threshold of starving or freezing. It is a terrible mistake to go around acting as though there is a benevolent God watching who will save us if we are only faithful to "market forces". We create and maintain markets, and live or die as a result.