America, the land of prosperity, is rapidly becoming the land of shortages and wai-lists. Want a car? Order it and wait. Want an appliance? Order it and wait. Want cabinets to complete that home under construction or renovation? Order them and wait.  

Want to flip a light switch in your home? Soon you may have to wait for the lights to come on. Now there are predictions of electrical brownouts, not just in the People’s Socialist Republic of California but in the Midwest and Northeast as well.

Why? Because the government is saddling private electrical generation with … more government requirements. Electric utilities are required to build or buy solar, and wind-generated electricity. Guess what? The sun doesn’t always shine, and the wind doesn’t always blow. Duh!

Want to feed your baby? Wait for the government to give the formula factory permission to reopen. Guess what? We can wait for cars, appliances, and cabinets, but babies can’t wait to be fed!

Why can’t we feed babies? Because the government is replacing capitalism with …. more government.

“We regulated the food away.” – The Rainbow Option by Michael McCarthy.

More Government = Less Food, Less of Everything

Before 1992, government-controlled everything in the USSR, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (emphasis added). Result? Shortages of everything for the common people. Take a look at this photo: Inside a Soviet Grocery Store in 1990. There wasn’t much to buy. Of course, the Communist Party Elites had plenty and had access to stores stocking luxury goods from the Western Capitalist countries. The common people had a cynical saying: “They pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work.” The “pretend” part of paying Russian citizens was that there was very little to buy. Well paid, but not well supplied. Why? Because you could not change jobs without government approval, you were, in effect, a slave of the government. So, you “pretended to work” and produced very little to buy. So the vicious cycle of the communist total government control of the country repeated endlessly. Nothing to buy, so why work? No work equals nothing to buy. Over and over.

Sound familiar? Does the 1990 picture of empty Russian store shelves look familiar? YES! Because now we see empty shelves in American stores!

Why? Same reason. The Covid “stimulus checks” (free money for not working) went out in April 2020 under President Trump and continued under the Biden Presidency. People were paid not to work. Predictable result? Shortages. This socialist policy begun by Trump and continued by Biden was a copy of the Soviet model. And once people got a taste of being paid to stay home and not work, they discovered they could continue doing it with unemployment benefits and welfare benefits. Now with Covid nearly over, businesses still can’t find enough workers. 

Not Working = Not Producing = Less to Buy

Not enough workers. Result? Not enough produced. Result? Not enough to buy. Result? Shortages and waiting. The usual gang of Democrat / Progressive / Marxist politicians wants to blame capitalism. Their solution? Less capitalism and more government, of course! 

Want to Starve Babies? Let the Government Get Involved

The “root cause” of the current baby formula shortage is government. Government has interfered with the everyday workings of free-market capitalism in three ways:

1 >  Inefficient inspection of baby formula production. Forbes Magazine reported, “a former Abbott employee documented concerns about the Michigan facility and sent them to the FDA in October — months before the FDA began inspecting the plant and issued a recall.” Why did it take months? Because it is the government, of course! A private certification company would have had frequent inspections scheduled as a matter of routine. Because we rely on the FDA instead of private providers, there were potentially bad products sent out for months.

2 >  Government makes it expensive to get into the business, so fewer companies make baby formula. Fun fact: there are only four, count ’em, four producers of baby formula in the United States. Why? Cost to enter the market, aka barriers to entry. Who puts up these expensive barriers? Guess! The government. “Baby formula costs a lot of money to build the factory and to get all the processes approved by the FDA,” explains Dr. Fullenkamp, an economics professor at Duke University. Want to make baby formula? Get your processes approved by the FDA. Approval is expensive.

3 >  Big buys by big government set up an oligopoly of the big four in baby formula. According to Politico, “The federal government’s widely-used nutrition program for women, infants, and children, known as WIC, is by far the largest purchaser of formula in the U.S., with more than half of infant formula in the U.S. going through the program. And just two companies serve close to 90 percent of the infants who receive benefits through the program, in part because of the way WIC awards its contracts.” When just two companies get the contract for more than half of all infant formula sold in the U.S., they have the advantage of mass production to lower costs and dominate the market. Small companies are thus handicapped by the federal government from the beginning. Result? Small companies don’t even try to get into the market for infant formula.

A Prediction I Hoped Would Not Come True

In The Rainbow Option, my apocalyptic novel about the collapse of the United States, there is a scene where a desperate Federal bureaucrat is trying to locate food for his children. The food shelves are bare everywhere. He is the Assistant Deputy Under Secretary for FDA Nutrition Enforcement, and he makes a phone call to his buddies in the FDA to get food. He gets a recording that “we are out regulating the food supply.” “But there is no food to regulate,” he shouts into the phone. Suddenly it hit him. We regulated the food away.

In the upcoming election, vote for candidates who will defund these excessive government agencies that are regulating the food away. Do it for your babies.