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Comment by bruce511 | Hacker News Reader

I don't think they'd need, or want, to ration.

Rationing was necessary because pricing laws stopped prices from climbing. So demand was higher than supply.

Today there would not be rationing. Prices would be allowed to float, so things in short supply just get expensive. Fears of exhaustion cause people to stock-pile.

This is exactly the approach taken during, and after, the pandemic. It's simpler to let people complain about shortages and prices, and the rich can get whatever they like, as much as they like.

Look at the varied response to "stay home and mask up" - actions which are literally trivial to follow. No sane US govt would attempt "rationing" - the population would simply ignore them.

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Making people stay home is a more major restriction than rationing non-essential goods. Social interaction is more fundamentally important to humans than being able to eat chocolate etc.

Food and gasoline are essential goods. The people were not overeating having to give up luxuries, they had trouble to get enough calories their bodies needed.

> Today there would not be rationing. Prices would be allowed to float, so things in short supply just get expensive. Fears of exhaustion cause people to stock-pile.

is that what happened during covid for masks and toilet paper?

Stores implemented limits per person/household, but you could easily work around those if you really wanted to. It wasn’t rationing on a federal or even just state level.

What I recall in my area was retailers and distributors doing the rationing themselves; "limit 2 per customer" and so on. Masks often didn't make their way to retail shelves because hospitals had purchasing priority.

Retailers mostly didn't raise prices even when they could have, because it wouldn't have been worth the bad optics.

Some people skirted the rules, bought out store shelves and set up their own at higher prices, but they were pretty thoroughly shunned and some were later taken to court.

Overproduction was the problem at the time, not shortages. There was a shortage of money caused by loans - it was impossible to make money to both buy all the goods and pay all the loans. This is why money lending has to be banned, as it makes the markets stuck like this and causes a depression when the economy improves.

Huh? How is the economy improved in a depression?

Loans cause a depression when there is plenty. A farmer takes a loan when the price of wheat is $2 a bushel. But the economy improves, there is plenty of wheat for everybody, so the price of wheat halves. The farmer can't react to it by growing less wheat, he has a loan to pay, he may even need to increase his production to be able to pay even with the reduced prices. This is happening to everybody. Any time money is made, part gets used to pay off debts, and isn't spent on goods that others produced, which further drives the prices down. You will soon reach a point when nobody will buy any more wheat for any price. You go bankrupt, and the bank gets your farm, but the farm is worthless, nobody's going to buy a farm in such an economy from the bank. The bank now has no money to fulfill its obligations. The money it lent you, and which was lost, is still on other people's accounts, so the bank can't give them their money when people demand to withdraw it. Nothing about it can be fixed by giving further loans - loans for consumption only create more debt in the process, and there is no opportunity for bussiness lians, as there is already too much of everything.

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