There's a difference between price gouging and covering expenses.
The guy buying up all the masks and reselling them for 10x the price is price gouging. He doesn't make anything.
If a manufacturer ramped production and billed the current inventory to cover costs, then that's a very different thing. Of course all of this is why the Defense Production Act even exists.
A perfect use of the DPA would be a mask manufacturer ramping up local production - if they had predictability of pricing beyond the current crisis, then it would let them forecast what they could and could not make, or get subsidized at the higher rate to ensure their business could ramp down gradually (or be retained at the subsidy price to ensure local availability for the next time).
The guy buying up all the masks and reselling them for 10x the price is price gouging. He doesn't make anything.
If a manufacturer ramped production and billed the current inventory to cover costs, then that's a very different thing. Of course all of this is why the Defense Production Act even exists.
A perfect use of the DPA would be a mask manufacturer ramping up local production - if they had predictability of pricing beyond the current crisis, then it would let them forecast what they could and could not make, or get subsidized at the higher rate to ensure their business could ramp down gradually (or be retained at the subsidy price to ensure local availability for the next time).