There's a shortage of passenger pigeon meat - okay, complete lack of what used to be a common and cheap meat. Yet the government did not fix that price. Indeed, its belated attempts to fix the price through laws to protect the pigeon were not successful.
Similar observations can be made about many ecological situations, like the nuts and wood from the American Chestnut Tree. Some few survive, but not enough that the line "Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire" resonates with the general American Christmas experience.
More generally, you should expect to see oscillations any time there's a delay in the feedback in coupled systems. This comes naturally from the predator–prey equations - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotka%E2%80%93Volterra_equatio... . There's no need to require government price fixing for that to happen.
What you're observing here is the "Tragedy of the Commons". Nobody owned the passenger pigeons, so people hunted them to extinction. This is not free market. For example, despite all the pigs, cows, and chickens being eaten, there is no shortage of them and no threat of them going extinct. That's because people own those resources, they are not in the Commons.
Oscillations are not shortages. For example, when there's a natural disaster, people load up their pickups with gas and water and rush in to sell it at high prices. I.e. the shortage promptly disappears. People get mad at the high prices and pass laws to prevent that (i.e. price fixing), with the predictable result of shortages while they wait for FEMA to get around to delivering supplies.
There's plenty of wood for all uses. If you drive the back country, you'll see quite a few tree farms.
> Puerto Rico
The shortages there are the ones government utilities are supposed to provide. A lot of people, however, made money providing various solar power systems. Anyone who can pay for it can get power.
It used to be part of the general American experience to eat chestnuts in fall/early winter. Hence the line "Chestnuts roasting over an open fire" which I quoted earlier.
The chestnut shortage caused that tradition to all but disappear.
The shortage wasn't caused by government setting the price. It wasn't caused by "Tragedy of the Commons".
You don't even think there is a shortage because we've adjusted. It appears to be that if people can survive without it, perhaps by using an alternative, then there cannot be a shortage of something.
Which is not what "shortage" means, at least for those who don't subscribe to the Texas sharpshooter fallacy.
(If that is what shortage means, there can never be a shortage of toilet paper because there are other ways to clean one's butt - or you can get used to having a dirty butt.)
Let's go back to the passenger pigeon. If we apply your logic then of course there's no shortage of passenger pigeon meat because really people are getting their food from other sources. Yes?
I'll note that you even acknowledge that the absence of passenger pigeon meat was not - contrary to your first assertion - based on government price fixing ("The only time there's a shortage in a free market is when the government fixes the price.") Instead, you say the problem is that it wasn't part of a free market at all.
So, what's the solution? Is is possible, within a free market system, to have saved the passenger pigeons? How does one "own" a migratory species which requires vast numbers in order to breed? And how does that ownership seem any different than price fixing by a monopoly owner, a.k.a., government prohibitions? And how does it factor in ecosystem changes caused by the presence/absence of that species?
There's a shortage of passenger pigeon meat - okay, complete lack of what used to be a common and cheap meat. Yet the government did not fix that price. Indeed, its belated attempts to fix the price through laws to protect the pigeon were not successful.
Similar observations can be made about many ecological situations, like the nuts and wood from the American Chestnut Tree. Some few survive, but not enough that the line "Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire" resonates with the general American Christmas experience.
More generally, you should expect to see oscillations any time there's a delay in the feedback in coupled systems. This comes naturally from the predator–prey equations - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotka%E2%80%93Volterra_equatio... . There's no need to require government price fixing for that to happen.