eBay bans sales of face masks and hand sanitizers to combat price gouging

From Wikipedia:

The new Whig administration, influenced by the doctrine of laissez-faire,[11] believed that the market would provide the food needed, and they refused to intervene against food exports to England, then halted the previous government's food and relief works, leaving many hundreds of thousands of people without any work, money, or food.

Charles Trevelyan, who was in charge of the administration of government relief, limited the Government's food aid programme because of a firm belief in laissez-faire.[98]

Which generally doesn't have to be ordered, because producers are already inclined to produce more during high demand.

You might also want to worry about the business consequences of ordering suppliers of critical products to spend money increasing capacity on an emergency basis without increasing their sales price. With no way to recover their now-higher costs, what happens when you drive them out of business and then need them again next time?

> and to set rules about distribution like limiting people to one box at a time or whatever

Which fails because some people have a legitimate need to buy in quantity, but it's an administrative nightmare to determine exactly who those people are and each failure to correctly identify results in a large quantity of items not going to people who legitimately need them.

It also violates the social distancing principle. Instead of sending one person from an office to the store to buy a box for each person from the office to take home, now every employee has to individually visit the store and create a new opportunity to transmit or receive an infection with other patrons or staff there.

> Markets are typically closer to economic optimality over the longer run but not in the short term,

There is no principle that markets are more optimal in the long run than the short run. Market failures exist, but they exist where they exist and not where they don't.

A huge demand spike isn't a market failure. The higher prices cause markets to do exactly what you want in that context -- increase production and reduce hoarding.

> and furthermore optimality is not always that important for many commodities that can be stockpiled against future emergencies.

This only works if they actually were stockpiled ahead of time, in which case there wouldn't be such a supply shortage that prices would rise to undesirable levels.

This appears to be a shifting of the goal posts. Your original comment remarked about how "Increasing prices on preventative medicine/devices is a great way to make sure fewer people use them", however now you seem to advocate for central allocation of medical resources. If the government is in charge of allocating resources, prices would be a moot point.

> I am talking about the rigorous microeconomic theory which involves using calculus is required to actually pass an economics course or analyze a commodity market. If you are not familiar with concepts like elasticity, substitution, or the difference between consumer and producer surplus then I suggest you look deeper into microeconomics.

The claim that economics requires "math" has no support - just follow the epistemology on the claim and it's a dead end. It is always stated matter-of-factly as if it is prima facie true. Social sciences have never been about maths outside of a very non-rigorous movement to convert social sciences into hard sciences.

For example, when I go to the store and they don't have what I want, do you believe there is an equation that I am operating on that instructs me in what to do next? If you truly believe this, then you believe in something akin to a religion - that there is some unknown but discoverable equation all of us make decisions with. If you don't believe this, then you cannot find that equations are how I am making decisions, therefore my decisions on how to allocate my resources are guided by something else, thus, microeconomics cannot be based on the maths.

It is also interesting you state calculus as if it is so hard. I haven't found evidence of this while I have seen people struggle more with advanced algebra than with advanced calculus.

Your statement suggests that Sowell somehow got through Harvard, Columbia, and University of Chicago without taking a "real" economics course, or that those courses were inadequate, or that Sowell is incapable of grasping these more advanced conecpts. These sorts of statements really just make you look like an ass, or worse.

BTW, your first sentence is nonsensical. Things that are theoretical do not "operate" because they are not in the physically existent universe, and economics attempts to explain things exclusively in the physically existent universe.

"There is essential agreement that particles with an aerodynamic diameter of 5 µm or less are aerosols, whereas particles >20 µm would be large droplets. Some authors define aerosols as ≤10 µm or even ≤20 µm (Knight 1973; Treanor 2005); particles between 5 and 15 to 20 µm have also been termed ‘intermediate’ (Couch et al. 1966; all values refer to the aerodynamic diameter; for bioaerosols, they refer to the aerodynamic diameter after evaporation). When reviewing the literature, it is therefore important to verify the size of the particles being studied and the authors' definitions."

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsif.200...

You seem to think it's possible to eliminate all resale markets, and thus eliminate the arbitrage opportunity. Ignoring the fact that hoarding would still exist, I would say such a thing is essentially impossible. Which makes the only way to eliminate the price difference (supply and demand curves held static) to have the store raise prices.