An armada of cargo ships lies offshore around U.S. ports. What’s the problem? Just unload the bleepin’ things! That’s President Biden’s attitude, anyway. “If the private sector doesn’t step up, we’re going to call them out and ask them to act” (ABC News, Oct. 15, 2021).
The time for calling them out has come and gone. When it became obvious that Big Media was intent on hyping the number of cases and ignoring the lethality of the virus, we should have known the fix was in. The Never-Let-a-Crisis-Go-to-Waste mob was intent on turning a flu-like virus into a cudgel.
The time to have acted to avoid the problem was upon us by May 2020, when New York City Health had reported that the risk of dying from COVID-19 with no pre-existing conditions was 0.9%. According to Worldometer (Oct. 17, 2021), deaths due to confirmed Coronavirus cases worldwide was 2.0%.
What did the Never-Let-a-Crisis-Go-to-Waste mob do to reduce cases? They shut down businesses, decided which workers were necessary, and ignored the instances of natural immunity. The result was to cripple the supply chain.
The crippler was what Friedrich von Hayek called the Knowledge Problem. Prices are more than the burden you bear to obtain goods and services. Prices carry essential information that tells producers when and how much to produce, or whether to go into a new line of business. No president assisted by an army of bureaucrats can do this. The Soviet Union tried. Durable goods manufactured at the time of the Soviet Union’s demise were “value-subtracted”—that is, the value of the resources that went into making the good had a higher market value than the good itself.
Milton Friedman illustrated the Knowledge Problem in a meme on the creation of a wooden pencil. “Both parties to a transaction can benefit provided it is voluntary and not coerced”. In other words, we still barter. But government interventions—seclusion of workers, vaccine mandates, and inflation, especially—muddy the knowledge embedded in the price. The only way that a capitalist society can function is for individuals to set a value on the trades they make in markets.
[You can see the meme on YouTube: Milton Friedman - Lesson of the Pencil ]
If Biden is part of the problem, he certainly won’t be part of the solution. The most likely outcome is that we will be chafing over this problem on the eve of Christmas…in 2022, depending on the outcome of the mid-terms.
The bigger problem for supply chain shortage is California's EPA and war on fossil fuels. The fake news tells you we have a shortage on truck drivers, but in actuality there is a shortage of trucks to unload the ships sitting off the coast of California. California will not allow tractors that pull those 50 foot trailers older than 2014 to operate on California highways. Trucks coming from other states must pick up their loads at the border. What is even worse is that trucks operating at the pier where the ships are offloaded must be 0 emission. So in reality what happens is, 0 emission trucks pick up a load and transport it an offsite location where it is then picked up by a truck that is 2014 or newer and then taken to its final destination. All the tractors older than 2014 have been sold to other states or Mexico or must get an engine upgrade at a cost of approx $50,000. Put this together with the $15.00 an hour min wage and the strangle on oil production and then you wonder why inflation is so high.
This just my Opinion, but the facts are there, if you take the time to check them out.
Tom Lazzara