Keep Sanitizer Out of the Market's Invisible Hand

During the weekend the New York Times reported on several professional price gougers who had rounded up Purell hand sanitizer and other disinfectants from local stores to sell at steep markups on the internet. The article was cast as something of a human-interest piece, reflecting how crackdowns on scalping had left these would-be entrepreneurs with excess supply and nowhere to sell. But the public blowback against them was swift and scathing, and at least one has already had his stash seized by a state attorney general.

As Bloomberg Businessweek noted recently, price gouging for essential services is hard to detect, much less prove -- unless, of course, someone brags about it to a major newspaper. But even so, it's worth trying to understand why we find the practice so objectionable.