Before the war, apart from certain statutory regulations limiting the prices to be charged by public utility companies, State control of prices was unknown, and, for the most part, unthinkable. Maximum prices, ‚fair‘ prices and penalties for profiteering and forestalling were classed among the economic heresies of the dark ages before Adam Smith proclaimed the gospel of modern commerce. … The idea that in the twentieth century laws could be passed and enforced, prohibiting private traders from buying or selling articles of food and clothing at more than prescribed prices would have been regarded as too paradoxical […]

That circumstances combined in
1916-17 to produce conditions similar to those that surrounded earlier
riots is beyond doubt. For the first time since the mid-nineteenth century
an English community was faced with an acute shortage of a basic
food for which there was no substitute; and the little supply available
could only be had at what was regarded as profiteering prices. There
was also the outrage caused by the knowledge that locally produced
food was being „exported“ to high-wage areas of the country in order
to obtain even higher prices

Quelle: Anthony James Coles: „The Moral Economy of the Crowd: Some Twentieth-Century Food Riots“, S. 158.

Merke: In einem Totalen Krieg ist es unklug, die freie Marktwirtschaft aufrecht zu erhalten.