Those government-run reserves always seem a bit silly to me. There's nothing special about the reserving business that normal private sector companies can't do.
(Especially if you abolish anti price gouging laws.)
If they could do it, we would have let them. But due to market failures throughout the course of history, we have learned to apply hysteresis to markets by stockpiling reserves and offering price supports in times of oversupply. The alternative is boom and bust cycles, which is fine for some markets like cryptocurrency and tulips, but bad for food and other necessities.
What kind of market failures are you talking about?
Robust futures markets are perfectly capable of protecting producers and consumers from price fluctuations (and help stabilize prices as they do so). Similarly for long term contracts between consumers and suppliers.
Futures markets and long term contracts don’t help people eat. You can’t eat food that doesn’t exist due to droughts, floods, freezes, fires, or pestilence.
Stockpiling is a rather straightforward operation. In addition, the benefits of stockpiling are both rivalrous and excludable. Ie stockpiles are not a 'public good'.
So the private sector is perfectly capable of stockpiling, too.
But the private sector generally doesn't stockpile, because the cost of maintaining a stockpile exceeds any immediate economic benefit of doing so. It is economically inefficient almost all of the time. Very occasionally it becomes useful, but current accounting practice, corporation law and shareholder demands do not have mechanisms for incentivising it.
One of the key roles of government is to provide services that are economically inefficient but are a public good.
When companies often last less than 50 years, they have no interest in preparing for events that happen every 50 years. If they did, it only makes it more likely that a competitor would out-compete them.
By your logic, Warren Buffett should have been able to buy spend just a dollar or so to buy insurance against someone getting everything right, shouldn't he? After all, the chances were exceedingly small and competition would have driven down the insurance premium?
The private sector is perfectly capable of providing security? Private sector entities store and handle valuable stuff all the time.
(Government) control is another issue. Obviously, a government run scheme would be under more government control. Though laws are perfectly capable of controlling private sector entities, too.
Security is not profitable until a crisis hit, why would a private company in the JIT business world care about the security of a society if it's not profitable until it is? That's exactly how you get price gouging...
(Especially if you abolish anti price gouging laws.)