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In the US, especially at the current federal level, the market is better at making a profit than the government is at governing.

> it's the job of the government to take over and make them

And how that usually works is that the government offers to pay a very high price to someone willing to doing so.

This isn't all that different as the government then pays 5x for the item.

It need not be a high unit price, often a sufficiently large order could do the same as well.

Depends on the timeframe. If you want 5 million masks next week and each machine produces 1 million a week, you need 5 machines. If you can wait 5 weeks, then one machine will do.

But yes, this certainly could be true.

I think they were arguing that measures intended to stop price gouging can disincentivize an increase in supply, e.g. it's a lot harder to undercut someone selling a pack of toilet paper for £10 than £1.

Definitely possible but I'm not sure it's happening specifically at the moment.