Renton, my logic is appropriately subjective and objective. The weakness with yours is that it's too objective and this should be obvious. Remember, we're talking about the Philippines during and immediately after Typhoon Hiayan and not a few weeks later when it might be possible to survey the entire marketplace and come to rational pricing and logistically match up needs with resources.

I appreciate that your sense of morality is to most equitably and efficiently match resources with needs but you are making a mistake in thinking that discretely quantifying these things during a crisis is the best method. There is a superior method that will both yield more profitable results and execute itself more naturally. It's actual morality. The rules of engagement which nature's evolution has already taken the time to build into us. The rules that say if you have the help to give, you give it because, if roles were reversed, that's what you'd desire.

This point should not be a hard sell. (Remember, typhoon bearing down on us.) If, along side your merchant, there was another man with a second generator who did not charge for its services but apportioned and reapportioned it out based on his judgement of greatest demand and asked for nothing in return, who would be generating more wealth? The second man. The first may never find the appropriate buyer, may constantly have to adjust prices, or simply settle for the first price which comes along and pocket the one time exchange, but in return he will always be branded by the community as a price-gouging douchenozzle. The second man will be generating wealth first by transferring his resources to those more in need for just as the world becomes more wealthy when a man with 2 dollars gives 1 to a man with 0, the world becomes more wealthy when this man provides for those in need in their time of need. After the disaster has passed, it would be the second man that would profit from a natural sense of deep reciprocity, admiration, and love from all those who he helped - should he return to business, he'll have adoring patrons for life.

And you can know that I'm right because the second man is exactly the man Wal-mart and Coca-cola and all of them try to be during and immediately after a disaster.