With central planning, resources go to the politically connected. So it's no different, the poor are reliant on better connected and/or wealthier people to provide them with some resources.
Pricing (which includes 'gouging') is not perfect, but it's better than central planning, price fixing, and quotas at efficient allocation of resources. At the very least it provides a 'wisdom of the crowds' affect where anyone with enough money can reallocate some of the resources to a location of need that might lack visibility to the hand full of people that would hypothetically be centrally planning all the resource allocation.
Wait, who was proposing or even talking about central planning in this thread? I think you're the first. I was going to propose we allocate resources by sacrificing goats to the thirteen forgotten gods of the underworld, and then interpret their bones for wisdom.
I just wanted to clarify that when you said higher prices discourage those with lower needs, what you really meant is that it discourages those with lower means-weighted-needs. Which is to say, it discourages the desperate-but-poor, rebalancing demand toward the less-desperate-but-more-wealthy.
The other alternatives proposed all over this thread such as purchase quotas, price fixing (stopping gouging), etc. are all central planning solutions. And those types of solutions are worse at efficient resource allocation than pricing and are less likely to get resources where they're needed most regardless of means or desperation.
Pricing spreads the capability of resource allocation around. In the central planning model the poor desperate person is reliant on a tiny group of central planners to allocate them some resources, and the central planners may not see that particular poor/desperate group. With the pricing model, anyone with the means can allocate resources where they see a need. In both scenarios the poor are reliant on someone else to allocate them resources. In the pricing model, the poor person has a better chance of being seen by at least someone with the means to make it happen.
If you have an interest in learning the core concepts of economics I can't speak highly enough about "Basic Economics" by Thomas Sowell. It provides a really great understanding of economics using history and lots of real world examples to explain the concepts in plain English. It's non-technical enough that the audio book is an excellent fit.
The grandparent's label of "central planning" seems to encompass almost any possible policy that deviates from a completely free market. I don't think any mainstream economics, other than caricatures, supports the idea that any possible economic policy that isn't a completely free market doesn't work.
You are making false claims about what I said. I intentionally used language like "better/worse" or "more/less efficient." Of course central planning will "work" in the sense that you will see that someone commanded some masks to be sent to a hospital, the hospital used them, and some lives were saved. However, a basic understanding of economics informs us that pricing is a more efficient tool at getting masks where they are most needed, and is likely to save even more lives. Pricing simply works "better."
Pricing (which includes 'gouging') is not perfect, but it's better than central planning, price fixing, and quotas at efficient allocation of resources. At the very least it provides a 'wisdom of the crowds' affect where anyone with enough money can reallocate some of the resources to a location of need that might lack visibility to the hand full of people that would hypothetically be centrally planning all the resource allocation.