$5000 per violation of price-gouging in CA
A lot of people in this thread are willfully ignoring some basic facts here.  These products <i>are</i> being made in sufficient quantity for everyone.  There is <i>not</i> a significant decrease in production.  There <i>is</i> a significant increase in hoarding, and in many cases it is for the explicit purpose of creating artificial scarcity to increase the price of a product.<p>This is not a case of toilet paper suddenly costing more to produce.  The price gouging law is not bringing toilet paper to levels where the <i>producer</i> of the product is taking some kind of operating loss or even reduction in profit of any kind.  This is a case of consumers attempting to create small niches of artificial scarcity so that they can profit.<p>The free market arguments being made here are baffling, and willfully ignoring the aforementioned truths of this specific set of circumstances that have driven these specific laws.  Have we lost all sense of humanity for the sake of our ideology?<p>We would be doing our entire society a severe disservice if our solution to this problem is simply &quot;create so much toilet paper that people can&#x27;t hoard it.&quot;  The fuck are we going to do with that much toilet paper.