Selling bottles of water and those kinds of essential goods to people who are in distress/physical need for it is a different story entirely.
And you're missing a significant part of that story.
If the market price for water is unusually high, that means that water is unusually scarce. If you force somebody to sell out all his water at usual prices to the first comers because your humanitarian ideals urge you to use force to make sure that people can have guaranteed access to necessities, then where are your humanitarian ideals after the water's all gone and people who need that water far more than the first comers did have to go entirely without it? Where's
their guaranteed access?
There's no such thing as a free lunch. Access--to necessities or anything else--cannot be guaranteed. If water's scarce, then water's scarce, and you can't make it any less scarce by holding the price down. In fact, you'll make it significantly
more scarce by doing so, because if the price is high, the increased profit will attract unusual distribution efforts from places where the price is still low, and somebody can make money on the difference by transporting it. Furthermore, he who jumps into that market soonest will make the most money, so it'll happen fast--much faster than any government can move. High prices in places of scarcity are the fuel that drives the mechanism that eliminates the scarcity. Coerce that fuel out of existence, the way the Soviets did, and you're stuck with the scarcity, the way the Soviets were.
High prices also encourage conservation. If a flat of bottled water costs $40 instead of $4, you're going to do some thinking about how badly you really need it before you buy it, rather than just picking it up as an afterthought. If you decide you don't actually need it as badly as you need certain other things, then maybe it'll still be around when somebody who
does have a $40 need for a flat of bottled water comes by.
None of this has a single particle to do with greed. (The word "greed" in a political argument--especially among people who are anti-socialist--is a signal that somebody has been infected with a bit of socialist class envy that he needs to work on.) It has to do with making sure scarce life-or-death resources get distributed as well as possible as quickly as possible. The free market has always been much better at that any any iron-fisted State spouting humanitarian lies.
