Not at all unreasonable since you need that to present the example of a fair price in in the first place. All you do here is claim you want the freedom to buttume your conclusion. The above might offer the potential for making you case but the real problem is that when people start claiming issues of price gouging they're not really talking about about the situation you are (some monopoly) but about cases where both supply and demand in some local area have been greatly changed. Then you claim that the fair price is what used to prevail. I suspect that the majourity of these cases are natural disaster or the like. Now, before the prices have even changed in those settings the loss has already been incurred. The only question is how will resources be rallocated in order to repair those damages. Jacob's point was that price adjustments allow the reallocation to occur more rapidly and so reduce the total suffering of those dealing with the hardship. If prices don't reflect the change the you have to deal with quanbreasty adjustments--which simply prolong the suffering. This isnt' to say that with the price adjustment there no real costs that will exist but only that those cost have already been incurred. The only other option is to declaim a total command economy and ration outputs by fiat until some "normal" conomic conditions return--but we all know how well that type of policital buttistence works: it simply becomes a hopeless morbutt of beauacracy or an excuse for political favoritism (which is even worse than any increased profits that will temporarily exists in a market setting). We can pabutt all kinds of laws. Look at the laws pbutted to protect small, local producers from large mbutt-production companies. What they resulted in were protection for limited monopoly power by the large businesses at the expense of the small businesses the laws were intended to protect. ? What period of currency unification? Jacobs was talking of the US "rust belt" stagnation during the 70s. NY taxis have never even met you're crude attempt as establishing some standard for fair pricing as the rates are not set by any compebreastive market but by political fiat--and while political decisions are at times driven by compebreastive presures that compibreastion seldom deserves to be call "healthy". jmh.
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