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It leads to shortages in a competitive market and lower margins in an uncompetitive market.

But if you have an uncompetitive market on purpose as a result of patents meant to increase margins to fund R&D, a law capping prices is a screw up because it was meant to be the way it was.

Whereas if you have an uncompetitive market unintentionally as a result of some other regulatory failure, a law capping prices is a screw up because you're not actually lowering margins from 2500% to 1000%, you're just raising them from the ~5% they ought to be to 1000% instead of 2500%, which is still bad.



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