From the Tom Woods Letter:

Everything about this virus situation is making me crazy.

Including this kind of thing, from socialists:

So it's "capitalism" that makes people fight over toilet paper at a time when toilet paper isn't a product they particularly need.

Socialism, they tell us, is "a system in which scarcity is no longer an issue."

So when there's an unanticipated pandemic, socialism will evidently have huge warehouses of toilet paper sitting there for no reason, waiting for consumers who don't actually need it to get all they need.

Well, that seems like a rational approach to production.

How about the fact that it's capitalism itself that's made it seem normal and unremarkable that everybody you know readily purchases and uses soap, disinfectants, and sanitizers?

Which European king had all of these?

Scarcity is always an issue. If we produce A with resources B, C, and D, we cannot simultaneously produce F with B, C, and D. If we employ labor in the service of one line of production, we cannot simultaneously employ it in the service of another.

Here is the situation we face:

Billions of people have an enormous number of conflicting preferences.

We have to figure out a way to satisfy as many of those preferences as possible, but arrange the means of production in such a way that in satisfying one preference we are not inadvertently depriving more urgent preferences of the resources necessary for them to be satisfied.

The market economy, with its price system, accomplishes this seemingly impossible task — or at least approaches it as closely as mankind is capable of — without coercion or central direction.