>Price gouging incentivizes creative and extreme tactics to increase the supply of a scarce good. And even when supply is inherently fixed, it at the very least gives you a clean way (even if it's not necessarily fair or good) to figure out who gets the last 10 bottles of water.

If we're willing to discard fair and good there are plenty of "clean" ways to distribute water that aren't gouging.

>If you create a law that bans me from selling water for $99, I'm not going to be able to do any of that. Not only am I no longer incentivized to drop everything and spend a week organizing a water supply chain, even if I was incentivized I don't have the kind of budget I need to get water bottles into a city that's underwater.

Good. Listen markets work in certain situations but maybe it's time we stop trying to marketize everything. Disasters are not your business opportunity. This is firmly in the government's realm and we should ask government to do more. If our social contract is a kind of insurance on the harshness of nature then it's hard to see a situation more deserving of government intervention than a natural disaster. This is the exact same problem we have with healthcare: find a market where people need your product to live, push that price up as high as you can. Charging the needy $100 for water is sick and reminds me of a Galbraith quote, namely that you are:

engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.