How could the oil companies sell so much oil at extremely high prices, almost as much as they sold at low prices? It appears that people did not reduce their consumption all that much, that's one thing.
Observe that when Reagan ended price controls we immediately had an end of shortages, followed by falling prices. Competition and private enterprise resumed, and competition cut prices.
Reagan also started a vast system of permanent deficit spending, and after the immediate improvement we got the Reagan recession. It's hard to separate out the various results if we look at the data. Start with one theory and it's easy to find data that supports it, but the other direction is far more difficult.
The government initially controlled prices. Shortages immediately ensued - in part because many people knew that price controls would result in shortages and rationing. So the government, to deal with the shortages, immediately introduced an vast system of rationing and fuel allocation, sending fuel to one place and not to another place, favoring the well connected, and disfavoring the less connected. This scheme meant that the way to get more wealth was not to produce more fuel, but to get in on government, with the result that shortages became more severe.
Putting aside the history of how it might have happened, I agree with you that all the things you say are plausible and predictable.
Government price controls lead to rationing and production quotas - socialism - government takeover of the production process. Government does not produce fuel, only good intentions, leading to more severe shortages.
So if there is a proper use for any of this, it's as a strictly temporary measure to handle a sudden shock. If there's a temporary food shortage then we can keep poor people from starving by one way or another getting them food during the crisis. Rationing and price controls might be useful after a crop failure, if it's plain they aren't going to affect next year's crop. If the crisis and the response are not both strictly temporary, it's no good.
The fact that the crisis ended the way it did demonstrates the perverse effects of price control. In the long run, and by the long run I mean a year or so, price controls not only produce shortages, but higher prices.
The traditional way to handle food shortage was for the government to stock up on food to feed the king and his court, and then talk about how sad it is that God has caused another famine. What else could they do? Government did not have a lot of technology available. I read that Lincoln handled his end of the Civil War with less than 50 clerks, who wrote in longhand.
Then we got the typewriter. The typewriter let clerks write faster so there were more papers to file. Starting with Rooseveldt, Washington DC grew faster than expected until the 1980's. By "faster than expected" I mean faster than sewage treatment plants could be funded and built. Each time they predicted the growth in population and built sewage plants to suit, the population grew more before the renovations were complete.
Typewriter-driven government was not fast enough to manage sudden shocks. By the time they got a bureaucracy set up to handle something like rationing, the shock was over and they were into "for the duration".
The welfare system is an obvious example. Starting in the late 1940's we started mechanizing agriculture in the south. As a result we didn't need many sharecroppers, and a whole lot of former sharecroppers got pushed off the land and wound up in northern cities. In the short run there were few jobs for intentionally-uneducated blacks, and it was a crisis that was worth doing something about. But what we got was a typewriter-driven bureaucracy that persisted for generations.
In the 1960's we started to get computer-driven government. Large numbers of people could collect data which could be entered into databases and which could then generate statistics which nobody knew what to do with. Economists argued about what the numbers meant.
Before we found out how to effectively use computers, we got the internet. How will internet-driven government work? How fast will government adapt?
There were a lot of complaints about government action after Katrina, but I noticed that a fair number of refugees were issued debit cards and told to look after themselves. Given the US economy that's probably cheaper and easier than setting up refugee camps.
I read part of a couple of books by people who played key roles in the Katrina recovery. I was struck by the efforts to figure out who was in control. Then the people who had authority each got buried under a giant load of requests for authorisation plus requests for assistance etc. Old-style.
Networking will eventually provide government with the opportunity to respond quickly, to do the wrong things fast and efficiently on a large scale.
It may also provide unknown opportunities for others.