> doing your best to make sure everyone at least gets access
No, you don't. You're usually just limiting the supply even further by discouraging sales, and at the absolute best, shuffling around the people who get to buy the item. You can't help scarcity at all by fixing prices.
The supplies that just flew off the shelves and were sold at a fair price are more than incentivized for being restocked or even served by pop up wholesale resellers.
It's not like the anti-gouging laws lock in a price under profitablity; the stores wouldn't have the items even before the anti-gouging kicks in if that were the case.
You are ignoring the motivational power of 10x increase in profit, for a vendor. Also the de-motivational power of a 10x increase in price, for a hoarder.
In fact, a high enough price may even turn a hoarder into a vendor.
"You can't help scarcity at all by fixing prices."
Yes, you definitely can.
The price which incurs maximum profits for producers has little to do with consumer surplus or the maximization thereof.
Price fixing alters the distribution of surpluses one way or the other, because we don't measure consumer surplus directly, we often think of 'reduced profits' to the producer, but fail to regard the increased surpluses to consumers.
The term 'scarcity' is a bit of canard, because very, very few things are actually truly 'scarce' like Gold, most things depend on labour inputs, materials, and especially opportunity cost.
Vaccines are an example. Phizer could probably make a lot more profit by charging $150-500/vaccine in the USA, which might leave 65% of Americans in the lurch.
But the surpluses to citizens arrived at through a 'not really market price' negotiated between the US Gov, and Phizer, are much more vast.
Especially the moment you consider longer term effects (i.e. limited deployment of vaccine hurts the economy badly and thus other lines of revenue) you see the systematic effects.
I seriously doubt Pfizer had a choice in how to market the vaccines. I bet governments imposed their rules or else.
And that is how we ended up with the completely f'ed up allocation where in the beginning elder folks completely isolated from the virus had priority while active, exposed younger persons did not have access.
Central planners have failed over and over again to allocate resources as needed in the territory, while a market-based approach will simply and elegantly solve this problem while maximizing the incentives for producers.
No, you don't. You're usually just limiting the supply even further by discouraging sales, and at the absolute best, shuffling around the people who get to buy the item. You can't help scarcity at all by fixing prices.