 For example, suppose that a manufacturer figures out how to make an “epipen” that can save the lives of consumers otherwise at risk of fatal allergic reaction to bee stings. Suppose the manufacturer can produce a limited supply of epipens for a little less than a hundred dollars each, and proceeds to offer them for sale for a hundred dollars. Suppose that the manufacturer finds that buyers line up by the thousands wanting to buy the pens, and suppose that there emerges a group of “scalpers” willing to stand in line for weeks, who buy all the pens for a hundred dollars each, then resell the pens for two hundred dollars, then three hundred, then four, and demand remains strong. Hayek would predict that if we let the price signals be the marvels that they are, then other producers will jump in and begin to manufacture pens for one or two hundred dollars each. Eventually the demand is met, and the scalpers go away. Meanwhile, new producers drawn by the spike in profitability invent a new process that enables them to produce the pens for ninety dollars, then eighty, and again the price will fall, as competition leads the price signal to track the falling cost of production. Of course, if we issue a patent or a licensing scheme or some other way of preventing rival producers from entering the market, then this will not occur. By the same token, if we impose a price ceiling of a hundred dollars, then no signal is sent to prospective rivals, unless scalpers send the signal to rivals willing to produce for the black market. Or if there is some other reason why it is impossible to increase the supply, then prices may drift up toward the limits of a customer’s willingness to pay. Barring this, there are many ways for kings, legislators, or other planners to interfere, but price signals, if left alone, are an inimitably rapid and incomprehensibly vast generator of information: supply and demand tend to equilibrate, and to converge on a price in the neighborhood of the cost of production. To a uniquely reliable degree, a product will tend to end up in a consumer’s hands just in case that particular consumer wants the product enough to pay what it cost to produce it. 