[Alberta's Child]

He makes a good point, but he overlooks the importance of public perception in this case. If I owned a business and was constrained by a price-gouging law (or even if I wasn't), I would couple my restraint in raising prices with a limitation on how many items I would sell to any one customer. If I couldn't charge more than $2.00 for a bottle of water, I wouldn't think of selling my entire stock to the one guy who showed up with a pickup truck and wanted to clean every bottle off my shelves.

I've often wondered how effective these restrictions on price gouging are, anyway. Couldn't a business owner circumvent them by simply announcing that he was selling his scarcest products at an open public auction in his parking lot?

[CTOCS]

I imposed a limit of one large ice and two gallons of water per family. It seemed fair to me to spread the resources to as many families as possible and not to the one rich guy who could afford it all.

And don't anyone start on me with any "communism" BS.

You have to live through one of these disasters to fully appreciate and understand it.