Agree - gouging doesn’t exist in a free market. Things priced over market won’t be bought. Now taxes are another matter by definition.
Milk at my grocery store was .98 cents a gallon last week. It all was on the last sell by date. The extreme weather threw a wrench into supply and demand. Call me the gouging consumer. I bought three.
Companies cannot “gouge” in a free market except when the government distorts the market.
Of course, there is the opposite of “gouging” when government gives away free money to distort the market like EV tax breaks. Maybe they should excoriate their endless and bottomless “reverse gouging.”
Then there is the biggest gouger by many orders of magnitude — the USA Feral Government. A few pennies more for a box of crackers is nothing compared to the hundreds of thousands of dollars I sent to this Supreme Gouger and got very little of value in return. Some now-crumbling roads, a military that used to be strong, and a civilization in ruins. The National Parks are still nice, I guess.
Economists Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams set this issue right.
Remember during the COVID scare, when bottled water, paper products and diapers were almost non-existent in the stores? That was because “anti-gouging” laws and edicts made stockpiling them so affordable. As a result, there was no supply for people who really needed them immediately.