You could say that the producer can't make more than x% profit. The problem with that is that in a volatile market prices move up and down, so a guaranteed profit makes the price worse for consumers since you are guaranteeing a profit for the producer, which is not the case now. Also, reputable producers will try hard not to look greedy in a market of shortages so they have an incentive not to raise profits more than what people would see as reasonable- may be 5%-10% not 50%-?%. They don't want the customer to be more upset than what they already are.
An artificially lower price will cause an increase in demand since more people will be able to afford the product. Given a product that's short in supply, the rise in demand will increase the shortage.
Politicians commonly advocate a limit since people intuitively think it makes the situation better, which in fact it does not.
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.
Same case with arms export German population wanna help, politicians not so much and bomb every export proposal(even with 70%/75%+ popular support which is extremely weird for democracy)
The same can be said of fossil fuels in general, they're been priced at the cost of extraction, not even a tiny fraction of their true value for 200 years. That pulse of incredibly cheap stored sunlight is entering its decline phase now, and I worry that humanity isn't ready to handle it.
The same goes for climate change too, because the free market currently does paper over the environmental cost of production, nobody have to change their behavior, and soon our planet will be inhabitable.
I started paying 0.17€/kWh which is way more than I used to pay but not that bad with all the current events. After limiting the natural gas price I started paying between 0.15€ and 0.2€ per kWh as a kind of subsidy to keep the price below certain threshold. So, yeah, I'm paying twice as much per kWh to keep the prices low.