[Our man in washington]

If only we had a means of encouraging people to produce more of a scarce item and discouraging people from consuming it. Wait, there might be...I think it’s called “price.”

[QuisCustodiet1776]

Exactly.

[Army Air Corps]

B-b-b-but, that sounds like something from Market Economics! The horror!

[HiTech RedNeck]

How much of the price of “chocolates” is the actual chocolate in them? If the price of raw chocolate doubled, would that mean Hershey bars would cost twice as much too?

[Yo-Yo]

If only we had a means of encouraging people to produce more of a scarce item and discouraging people from consuming it. Wait, there might be...I think it’s called “price.”

You heartless capitalist pig, you. How are the poor supposed to afford chocolate if you raise prices? We will need a government subsidy program to provide chocolate grants to those at 150% of the poverty level and below, and we need to levy a chocolate production surtax on the greedy chocolate corporations to pay for it.

[SpinnerWebb]

Last year, the world ate roughly 70,000 metric tons more cocoa than it produced. By 2020, the two chocolate-makers warn that that number could swell to 1 million metric tons, a more than 14-fold increase; by 2030, they think the deficit could reach 2 million metric tons.

It's this same kind of linear thinking without underlying physical or economical cycles taken into account, that has given us the Global Warming meme.

[wagglebee]

If only we had a means of encouraging people to produce more of a scarce item and discouraging people from consuming it. Wait, there might be...I think it’s called “price.”

Exactly.

Unless I'm overlooking something, nobody actually NEEDS chocolate, but a lot of people WANT chocolate.

The candy companies should just raise the price until the market evens out. I don't know why they're complaining, this seems like a golden opportunity for them to make more money for their shareholders.