He's capturing availability, the manufacturer made the availability. There is no value-adding middle man role with a 10x value here (well value to anyone other than the middle man).
If people shouldn't profit off disaster, why profit from any misfortune?
What kind of smile is there when there is nothing to buy at any price?
Before all these laws, in natural disasters there used to be marginal producers (people with a pickup truck etc) who would load up on some supplies like ice etc. and bring them to the area that was hit to make a quick profit. When the electricity is out and someone wants $12 a bag for ice it would anger you if you just want to keep your drinks cold, but you would think it is a bargain if that way you can keep your insulin chilled.
https://www.econlib.org/library/Columns/y2007/Mungergouging....
The article I linked too was the personal experience of an economist who was in Raleigh after a hurricane hit the area. As he writes:
>...The problem for Raleigh residents was all about price, at that point. The prices of all the necessities that I wanted to use to “preserve, protect, or sustain” my own life shot up to infinity. Within a day after the storm, there were no generators, ice, or chain saws to be had, none. But that means that anyone who brought these commodities into the crippled city, and charged less than infinity, would be doing us a service.
There were not tons of people bringing supplies into the city. The state had to actually beg other states and the federal government for supplies.
In the long run, high profits during a shortage also mean that suppliers in general will be incentivized to keep a larger stockpile of things that have a good shelf-life since they know they will be able to make good money the next time there is a shortage (more than the storage costs). If you are going to literally make it illegal to try this, then you better have a government be willing to spend its tax dollars on creating a stockpile rather than spending money on more immediate things that are more likely to get votes. (We've now seen that all the talk of the national stockpile the federal government supposedly had was greatly exaggerated.)
For these reasons, a majority of economists are opposed to 'price gouging' laws. For example see http://www.igmchicago.org/surveys/price-gouging/
In the hypothetical, you have no idea whose life is more at risk. And the central planners who want to implement price fixing, purchasing quotas, etc. do not have much if any more insight than you.
A _manufacturer_ charging more is not _front-running_.