I've laid out a basic structure for my stance already so let me turn the question back to you: Do you feel that traditional market forces, with hoarding, panic buying, and price gouging at the same time health care providers run out of PPE, ventilators and other equipment... Do you feel the market forces are working in a way that best serves resolving this crisis and helping those in medical peril?
The basic structure of your approach is a vague idea that falls over in all sorts of ways once you attempt to put it into practice. Your comment is also conflating many different issues together. Contrary to your claim, I don’t think the general public has been rushing out to panic buy ventilators, or other heavy duty medical equipment. The government assuming an elevated level of control over the supply chain for medical PPE is also a completely different proposition to allowing Microsoft to increase the costs of video conferencing to properly scale to demand.
The phrase “panic buying” is really just a way to confound discussion about what’s really happening. There is a perfectly legitimate increase in demand, and a perfectly legitimate decrease in supply. If you wanted to stop people from hoarding, allowing market forces to respond to those changes would certainly shut it down. Any centrally enforces rationing policy is going to be far less efficient. The distinction between essential products and services, and non essential ones is also very real. You may choose that for any particular category of product or service, that the benefits in providing stability through rationing outweigh the costly efficiency trade offs. However that doesn’t obviously apply to every category of product or service under the sun.
The trade offs in efficiency are two fold. Firstly, the rationing authority has no effective way to gauge the actual needs of any person or organisation. So they will unavoidably end up allocating too much to some and not enough to others. Secondly, the market will typically respond to increased prices by increasing production. By keeping prices artificially low, you completely remove that incentive, and if the costs of production have risen (as they have), then you end up trying to manage the shortage by applying downward pressure on supply.
Finally, the issue of people not being able to afford the basic necessities of life is completely separate to that of supply and demand. There always have been and always will be people in that boat, regardless of whether there’s a global crisis taking place or not. In developed countries those people receive increased government assistance. I’ve never heard anybody seriously suggest that we should instead engage in mass price fixing to reduce the price of everything, rather than simply providing that assistance.
