You're right. That is a flaw with the free market. A rich person mildly wanting something will outweigh a poor person desperately wanting something. That said, the alternatives aren't much better. A wait list doesn't have any concept of neediness. self-reporting is unreliable (everyone will just say they really want it). A neediness assessment (ie. auditing each applicant's neediness) could theoretically work, but requires time/resources, and still has biases (eg. people with "visible" problems probably will look more needy than someone with hidden ones). Moreover, none of other distribution methods incentivize further supply. A sibling comment covers this:
>What makes dollars unique is that if you inject more dollars into the free market for a good, then ceteris paribus, you will cause more of that good to be produced. Whereas if you injected more bureaucratic know-how into the Canadian patient population, you'd merely cause more intense competition for the same fixed number of physician-hours.
>What makes dollars unique is that if you inject more dollars into the free market for a good, then ceteris paribus, you will cause more of that good to be produced.
If the video card shortage has taught us anything, it's that this is not always true.
I think you need to factor in timeframes here. The demand shock for silicon started less than 2 years ago. The time it takes to bring a fab online is much longer than that. More of the goods will be produced eventually, but the market can't materialize it out of thin air.
I certainly hope that is the case, but I remember the Nvidia CEO (it has been a while so things may be different now) saying they would not increase production because they were worried the demand surge was temporary. So long as crypto is profitable I don't see where any amount of production increase is going to stabilize the price. Maybe Ethereum PoS will fix this? Or will another PoW cryptocurrency just take its place?
