The single mention
ICE enters the excerpts only once, and not as a subject in its own right. In the 2019 episode on rent control, Charlie Deist reaches for ice as an example of a good that becomes desperately sought in an emergency. Arguing that rent control harms the people it intends to help, he compares a cap on the price of water during an emergency to a cap on ice, which he says people need to keep baby formula preserved or medicine. He describes people in the most desperate need who would be willing to pay $100 even for a bag of ice, or $50, whatever it might be The Rent Control Bomb (2019).
The mention is illustrative, not analytical. Deist’s point is about price signals: he says a price signal can be thought of as a signal wrapped in an incentive, and that if you take away the incentive, you take away the supply. Ice functions in his argument as one more commodity whose emergency price carries information, alongside water and housing. Nothing in the excerpt identifies ICE as an agency, describes its functions, names any official, or dates any action. The word appears only inside a hypothetical about emergency purchasing.
The argument the mention serves
The ice example sits inside a longer exchange about whether any market price can be called unconscionable. Bob Zadek opens by saying that no market price can ever be unconscionable unless one has a distorted conscience, and he ties the question to the concept of alleged price gouging, which he says the show has discussed more than once. His central illustration is Hurricane Sandy, when entrepreneurs bought up cases of water and drove at great peril and expense into hard-hit areas, selling bottled water at perhaps four or five times the usual price. Zadek argues that all the water was bought up immediately, which in his reading means the sellers were not overcharging but charging the market price at that time and place, and that without those entrepreneurs the people who needed the water would not have gotten it The Rent Control Bomb (2019).
He extends the point with hamburgers at airports, which cost more because the market is captive: a traveler cannot drive down the interstate to find a hamburger place. Price gouging, on this account, simply represents the higher price a commodity commands based on the time and place it is sold, and the same reasoning applies to rents. Zadek concludes that there is no unconscionable price because nobody will buy at a truly unconscionable price, so the market rather than government tells a seller whether the price is right. Deist then maps the analogy onto housing developers, noting that Gavin Newsom had said California needs more housing construction, and returns to the emergency case: capping the price of water or ice removes the incentive that brings supply The Rent Control Bomb (2019).
Ice thus belongs to the same family of examples as bottled water after a hurricane and hamburgers at an airport. In each, the excerpts’ speakers treat a high price as information about scarcity and urgency rather than as misconduct. The 2019 excerpt breaks off immediately after Zadek says “Charlie,” so the discussion that followed is not available in the sources.
Across episodes
Only the 2019 rent-control episode touches ICE in these excerpts; the 2022 episode on inflation and grocery prices discusses price controls, price gouging and emergency pricing at length but never mentions ice, so the excerpts show no development in the treatment of the topic Liz Warren’s Crusade against “Big Grocery (2022).
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not say what ICE is, what it does, when it was created, who leads it, or what statutes or cases involve it. They do not state that ice was scarce during any particular storm, nor do they name a jurisdiction, a price, or a date for any ice transaction. Everything the sources offer is a hypothetical used to illustrate price signals in emergencies, and the 2019 excerpt ends mid-exchange, so even that discussion is incomplete.