Yes, you heard that correctly.

This is surely heartless, and may offend our sense of decency. But several respected economists from the Milton Friedman school of free-market theory take it seriously. They contend that anti-gouging measures, by effectively enacting price controls during emergencies, remove the incentive for consumers to conserve essential supplies. They also say that the incentive for suppliers to bring goods to dangerous areas — or keep extra stock on-hand before disasters — becomes distorted in ways that hurt people.

“Price caps discourage extraordinary supply efforts that would help bring goods in high demand into the affected area,” Michael Giberson, an instructor with the Center for Energy Commerce in the Rawls College of Business at Texas Tech University, wrote in an opinion piece from several years ago that was widely circulated around parts of Wall Street this weekend. Meanwhile, he suggested, “You discourage conservation of needed goods at exactly the time they are in high demand.”

He added, “In a classic case of unintended consequences, the law harms the very people whom lawmakers intend to help.”

Consider this scenario, as described by Matt Zwolinski, the director of the Center for Ethics, Economics, and Public Policy at the University of San Diego: If a hotel that normally charges $50 per room were allowed to double the price to $100 a night during an emergency, “a family that might have chosen to rent separate rooms for parents and children at $50 per night will be more likely to rent only one room at the higher price, and a family whose home was damaged but in livable condition might choose to tough it out if the cost of a hotel room is $100 rather than $50.”

The result, he contended in a paper titled “The Ethics of Price Gouging,” is that allowing higher prices “increases the available supply — as a result of consumers’ economizing behavior, more hotel rooms are available to individuals and families who need them most.”