The law of supply and demand is not a mere cultural artifact. In short, it is not comparable to the decision-making process that the lords of etiquette went through when deciding where the dessert fork should go relative to your plate. A moment’s reflection should tell you that they could have decided pretty much anything, or dispensed with a dessert fork altogether. It is not hard to go from culture to culture and observe different customs, whether those customs are still fixed or in the process of changing. But the law of supply and demand is not a custom, even though it involves human behavior. It is not possible to find a culture in which the law of supply and demand was not as fully operational and authoritative as the law of gravity.
So the fact that the functioning of the law of supply and demand involves human decision making and choices does not mean that it has to be in the dessert fork category. If you have a stadium full of 100,000 human beings, and there are six exits, a competent foot traffic engineer can tell you with a high degree of accuracy how that stadium will empty out. The nature of human nature will drive this, and it does not alter the law involved if we barricaded two of the exits.
In the same way, Congress cannot — even if the American people gave Obama a mandate to do so! — repeal the law of supply and demand. They can barricade exits, and they can provoke stampedes, and they can get people trampled. That is comparatively easy, the kind of thing that governments do well. But, to change the metaphor, throwing people off cliffs is not the same thing as repealing the law of gravity. It is in fact using the law of gravity to accomplish the evil that you want to do.
Market “interventions” don’t do anything to the law involved. They do quite a bit to the people involved. And that is what this is always all about — shall we go the way of coercion, or not? If we go with the former, then we are not coercing the law, but rather are using the law to coerce people.