consider the possibility that much of that is just because "healthy market adaptation to changing circumstances" has been rebranded as "price gouging" as a political stunt. i mean no one complains that airfare and hotels go up around the holidays. it's just extra demand. is there really anything inherently different here?

politics notoriously is a negative sum game. even seeing it as zero sum is too charitable. when they take from you to give to me, it's almost always net loss as they add friction and they distort future behavior. politicians almost never fix anything that they did not break in the first place. their most useful act is to get out of the way and let the market solve the problem.

prices are the signals markets use to allocate resources. if you break that mechanism, you get misallocation.