Under the price-control policy, the structure of production is diverted away from the efficient satisfaction of consumer demand. In particular, factors of production can no longer be fully allocated to their most valuable use. In practice, this problem is also often dealt with politically, by legal restrictions on the use of one or more of the factors of production. For instance, under agricultural price controls, farmers may be prohibited from cultivating particular fields, even while some impoverished buyers are unable to afford their artificially elevated grocery bills.

Furthermore, price floors (like price ceilings) create a fundamental conflict between regulatory policy and the value scales of market participants, so that buyers and excluded sellers find it profitable to engage in black-market exchanges. The resultant underground economy, of course, becomes a breeding-ground for more aggressive kinds of criminal activity. For instance, usury laws, which prohibit interest rates exceeding specified levels, can be understood as price floors on sales of future money (cf. pp. 4.7:10-4, 4.11:23). Under such legislation, lenders, who are the buyers of future money, are required to pay present prices that are unrealistically high (i. e., prices that translate into below-market interest rates), particularly in markets formed by less credit-worthy borrowers. Consequently, the latter borrowers, unable to sell future money and desperate for sources of present revenue, are driven into black-market transactions. This so-called "loan sharking" market is a particularly notorious reservoir of violence and organized crime.