In case you have not noticed, certain products have become very expensive due to shortages and/or hoarding. Should the government (federal or state) get involved to help consumers or should we leave it up to private companies to deal with the situation?
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Yes. That is one of the essential functions of government.
It's an essential function of a communist government.
Assuming you mean that fostering a society that allows its people to meet their most basic needs is an essential function of government, then setting prices is a particularly bad policy tool for that.
Yea, just got back from the grocery store. None of the meat in the butcher area had any price on it. When another customer asked how much the skirt steak was, they stated 9.99lb. This wasn't Whole Foods. Typically, you can find it for $4.99-5.99lbs. Sometimes even less. In all fairness their wholesale prices may have gone up. But I doubt it since they decided to remove all the prices on the meat.
An absolute last resort for essentials only, and perhaps not even then.
The academic view of price gouging is that it encourages suppliers to ramp up production and get as much supply to the affected area as quickly as possible so they can capture profits, which is the exact cure a shortage situation needs. Granted, this is overly simplistic, and the theory breaks down if global supply chains themselves are affected and already working at maximum capacity. I only mention this to illustrate that, while the conventional wisdom is to take aim at greedy capitalists and call for government intervention, market forces are our friend, to the extent we have a market.
When the government enforces artificially low prices, you still get bad behavior. People can more easily afford to hoard, and you inevitably get secondary or black markets that reflect the actual value. And in those black markets, you lose the regulations that protect consumers from unsafe or fake products. Higher market prices punish the would-be hoarders and force consumers to make tough choices about what is essential - again, exactly what we need.
The counterargument to this rightly focuses on the poor, whose "choices" aren't tough, they're impossible. You can't make a choice between steak and tuna fish if you can't even afford the tuna fish. The solution isn't to make the tuna fish free and pretend the unintended consequences aren't entirely predictable. Boost the social safety net so people can eat, and keep the market working.
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