ANALYSIS: TRUE. Times Square Olive Garden was right to charge $400 for New Year’s Eve dinner:

Like Uber and the airlines and many other businesses (including drivers of New York’s yellow cabs, who commonly switch off their availability lights and negotiate individual fares on New Year’s Eve), Olive Garden uses surge pricing: When lots more people want something that’s severely limited in quantity, prices go way up.

Is this practice “fair,” though? Certainly. Does it constitute “gouging” or “ripping off”? No. Businesses charge whatever the market will bear and are in no way obligated to forgo value by selling something for less than its worth, a figure that may depend greatly on timing: There’s a reason, say, why commuter rail fares are higher at rush hour, or why movie tickets are discounted at matinees.

If Olive Garden were charging its regular prices for New Year’s Eve in Times Square, it would have sold out long ago. The seats would have been gone in the first few minutes after the restaurant started accepting reservations, meaning the slots would effectively have been distributed randomly, to whoever managed to get through to the reservation desk.

If you think random distribution to the lucky at below-market prices is morally superior to selling to the highest bidder, why not support that in every other area of life? Because then all of life would be a free-for-all. Buying a tube of toothpaste would be like Walmart after they open the doors at midnight for the Black Friday sale. Having prices rise and fall in response to changing demand makes for an orderly society where things go to those who really want something.

See also: Toilet paper in Venezuela, a bankrupt state brought down by an economic system that Bernie Sanders is likely studying as a how-to guide.