I think there's a reason you always see economists and libertarians (and especially libertarian economists) harping on about rent controls and price controls on basic goods. It's because these are examples of price controls that can easily be illustrated and demonstrated to be very harmful to society. It's simple to mentally sort out why these types of price controls do great harm to the very people they are meant to help.
The goal is to establish a very basic tenet that ALL price controls are harmful. It's not quite as easy to demonstrate why wage controls or price gouging laws are wrong because a lot more emotional stuff enters into it and also the systems aren't as logically transparent. But we can go back to the simpler concepts and deduce that even the price controls that "feel" more right are most likely just as wrong for exactly the same reasons why rent controls are wrong.
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