- I'm willing to pay for someone to buy supplies on amazon and sell them here, or bring trucks of supplies from the midwest over to the city, and I respect the fact that that'll double to triple the price but at least it's an option (and it might be 4x or 5x while we wait for the trucks to come in, which is also logical to me)

And it's just grossly inefficient and expensive for all of us ourselves to buy it off ebay and amazon instead of having a centralized business that does it for us, so we still end up either spending more money in the end or just getting absolutely nothing, both of which are worse than if the business was allowed to just sell it.

But now those businesses are illegal and all of the businesses are scared of doing that, so we're all screwed. (Because it would force the retailer to raise prices which they're all terrified of doing because it would be an illegal increase, and the brand name pharmacies are scared of bad PR so they too post "Sold out" signs despite the fact that we desperately need these resources)

- Not to mention, when they do 2x-3x the price, the 50 rolls of toilet paper that are indeed in stock end up getting sold to 50 different people. Right now what happens, is that the very first person who walks into the store at 7:30am just buys all 50 and walks away. So that's 50x less distribution, and a bunch of people having to wake up early for literally no reason to compete in the "who will wake up and be there first" race. It's a pretty stupid way to distribute supplies.

Now people who used to run churro carts are selling toilet paper and obviously they have to increase the price from the standard but it's not that bad and now we can buy toilet paper, if they didn't do that what am I supposed to use? There would be no toilet paper. (And, since the churro carts never retailed toilet paper before, they're not technically increasing their price, so it's so far been allowed. At least we have *some* way to get what we need, but it's ridiculous that we during a pandemic are forced to just ride the potentially infected subway aimlessly until we finally find a churro cart selling toilet paper, like it's beyond stupid)

- And okay yes we're probably both worried about "well it's not fair that the stock that they do have got arbitrarily raised in price and now we have to pay for that even though they didn't pay for trucks to bring it here", that's fine, just make a "capital gains" tax of 80% on critical goods so that if the retailer had a roll of toilet paper than rose from 50c to $2 overnight, we the people get to take that money back, while still paying the correct price and can redistribute that particular unfairly earned  wealth.

Although with every tax you disincentivize something, now you screw out any company in for example Florida that could potentially save up resources during the summer to distribute in the fall hurricane reason, which would be a fantastic company that we desperately need in Florida every single dam hurricane season that gets screwed by the same stupid price increase law, but I think that could be a great law in NYC rn bc it's not like anyone predicted this would happen anyway (Or just have a clause that says if you predicted this would happen and have a receipt that says you bought the toilet papers or hand sanitizers before Mar 10, then you're now allowed to sell it at the higher price, thanks for moving the resources from a time of consumerism to a time of desperate need).

- We need both temporal and location arbitrage, the movement of resources from time before the epidemic to the time during the epidemic, and movement of resources to places that don't have the epidemic to places that do, or just more people trying to produce hand sanitizer and the other resources. And neither of these are happening because there's no incentive to, and all we have is Cuomo trying to get prison labor to make hand sanitizer for us which is a joke like so what if they make enough for 10,000 people there are 11 million people here it won't even make a dent. This is probably why Mao thought he could micromanage enough people to feed all of China when instead they just died of starvation, meanwhile saying "idk just do what you want bros" meant that people started to actually get the food they needed...., it's failing right now in NY and it probably failed then, the micromanagement of the gov trying to produce and redistribute is just failing nothing is actually making it to the city - just come here and check it out! I fail to see any prison-made hand sanitizer as promised: https://www.google.com/search?q=nys+hand+sanitizer+where+to+get&oq=NYS+hand+sanitiz&aqs=chrome.1.69i57j0l3.5725j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 sadly all of the news articles are from like 2-3 days ago, they made a promise and an announcement and basically nothing has happened since.

- idk normally i'm on the other side, I'm 99% democrat and 1% republican but this is the 1% this is where they are going too far and preventing us from paying for what we want to buy, meanwhile making empty promises to distribute the resources they claimed to distribute.

https://www.reddit.com/r/nyc/comments/fhrxa3/wegmans_in_brooklyn_looking_scarce/?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share

https://www.reddit.com/r/nyc/comments/fhsbi6/fact_nyc_hoarders_hate_quinoa/

"Most economic fallacies derive from the neglect of this simple insight, from the tendency to assume that there is a fixed pie, that one party can gain only at the expense of another."

- Anyway, that's at least my experience with it. If the gov did actually get these supplies onto the shelves I would have no problems and applaud them. It's just, they're not. So alas, the only option is to pay for them, and banning me paying for them is not helping.

(in NY there are like 5 shops within 2 feet of each other if the market retail price is $5 they'll all sell it at $5.10-$5.25 because they'll undercut each other, there are no monopolies here these stores are used to near-zero margins. Either they sell at $5.10, or they don't sell at all, there's no middle ground, and right now they're just not selling at all)