Gouge away!!  Gouging is the environment's friend.

Depends what kind of crisis, though. If one looks to be prolonged, as in a major war, people will overwhelmingly prefer rationing.

Several years ago the Canadian province of Prince Edward Island implemented a similar scheme to set fixed gas prices for specific periods in an attempt to prevent price "gouging."

The outcome was as described in the RR blockquote. Gas prices did not rise; there was also no gas available anywhere on the island and no plans to import any.

The legislation was repealed.

Cheers!

And I'm sure that if constraints on gasoline price incresases should become law, Big Oil wouldn't mind seeing some serious shortages sort of 'just happen', so as to teach the consumer a good lesson: the lesson being that the Little People shouldn't interfere with Big Oil doing its thing.

In all fairness to Big Oil, though, the Democrats are obviously pandering to the high level of antipathy among the general public toward Big Oil and will milk this issue for all it's worth.  

 There appears to be no sane middle ground: the Republicans are in bed with Big Oil; the Democrats want to paint Big Oil as the Prince of Darkness.

The question that remains to be answered is this: In the long run, will Big Oil be part of the solution or part of the problem? For me, the answer is by no means obvious.

 If Big oil continues to insist that we really don't have an imminent and serious supply problem and that global warming is just a lot of nonsense stirred up by a bunch of granola-crunching nervous-nellies, then they will be part of the problem. But if they start investing their enormous capital in alternative energy (excluding ethanol), then they could be part of the solution.  However, my gut feel tells me that pressure from Wall Street will force them to continue the status quo as long as they possibly can.

The only thing I can be certain of is that it is a very fluid situation.