Not everything is a perfectly elastic market. In fact, nothing is. For example, if I wanted to go out and hire 250,000 US-based computer programmers tomorrow, I would not be able to even if I wanted to pay them a million dollars each, since there are only 132,740 computer programmers across the entire US. So that would constitute a shortage of computer programmers. It would take many years to create the number of educational institutions, training programs, etc necessary to have that many programmers available to hire. The same could be said for many industries on a much smaller scale—how many people are willing to relocate to driving trucks in northern Canada? Probably not as many as you'd like, even if you had an unlimited budget. How many qualified airplane pilots are there in the world? Too few—we don't have enough training programs for them and mandatory "aging out" requirements have removed a lot of the pilots we already had. A lot of new training and education programs for pilots have been started in the past year, but they're going to take 4-5 years until the supply has increased enough that we're no longer in a shortage. (And although this is a heavy topic of debate between union leaders who say that there's no shortage and airlines who say that there is, I think the amount of investment in slow and costly supply increase programs is a good sign that there's at least some amount of supply constraint/bottleneck affecting the industry. It's hard for there not to be when safety and training requirements make the supply pool so slow to respond to changes in demand).