What a good example of how bad economic modeling is for real world applications. If there is a crisis for a critical good, the only solution that works is to t

What a good example of how bad economic modeling is for real world applications. If there is a crisis for a critical good, the only solution that works is to throw the market out altogether and create a temporary planned system of rationing. If five people are on a desert island with five watermelons, allowing the billionaire to eat all five because she has more money is not going to help. Similarly, if a nation can't produce or import enough food (e.g. in war time), you not only cap prices on food, you ration all the available food to try to make sure no one starves to death even if everyone is left hungry (or in even worse crises, allow people who wouldn't survive anyway to starve so that those that have a chance can get some rations). In reality, even for much milder crises, finding extra supply if prices are allowed to rise indefinitely happens rarely. Letting prices rise to any value is typically just a way to make sure the existing suppliers become filthy rich, it rarely does anything else. Of course, there are limits. If the government capped smartphone prices at 1$, we wouldn't actually get 1$ smartphones, we'd see the supply plummet to 0.