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She is not stopping the $1,000 generator if that is fair. What she is saying is that if this is a generator you list in Miami today for $100, then tomorrow, because of the emergency you raise to to $1,000 to take advantage, that is gouging. A bit more to this, but gouging is an ethical and moral issue, as well as legal. Say it is water, today it is $1 and tomorrow you charge $10. The poor person, thirsty has a $1 but you opt to skip them, to instead sell to a rich person for $10. Or, you take that poor person’s last $10 for that $1 bottle of water. The bottle didn’t cost you more today, you just had chance to jack up the price. I’m sure others can explain this better—there was a thread on FR about this over the past week.

Makes sense what you say, but she specifically complained that people were bringing in generators from out of state and charging $1000. I didn’t know you could buy any kind of generator with significant output for $100.

So how is it the poor person is more deserving of the bottle of water than the rich person? If you may only continue to sell water for that $1 then you have little incentive to bring it into the area and maybe nobody gets water. If that water is sold to the rich guy for $10 then people load up with bottles of water to rush in to sell them for $10 but the price they can actually get goes down as the gougers bring in more water to make all that money. Without the "price gouging" perhaps water is not offered for sale because it takes effort and expense to bring it in and if there s no reward then it can stay in the store in the next county and that poor guy who only has a dollar still can't get the water he wants and can't get it a little later when the price would drop down to that 1$ because there is so much coming in to take advantage of $10 water.

In fact, it is price gouging only if somehow other dealers in water are prevented from serving the emergency market so that more supplies are not rushed in. Only a government can do that.