Rep. Matt Rosendale, R-Mont., told Newsmax that empty shelves across the country due to the supply chain shortage is making the U.S. look a lot like Russia.
”If you would watch the newsreels now, you would think that you were watching something out of Russia from about 20 or 30 years ago, with bare shelves and supply chains being shut down,” Rosendale said Wednesday on ”The Chris Salcedo Show.”
”The administration is already warning people that if they want to have presents under the Christmas tree this year, they need to start ordering them now. The problem is, you can’t get them, and if you can, they’re probably about 30-50% more expensive than they were this exact time last year.”
The lesson? Supply and production matter.
The other lesson? Capitalism IS the supply chain. Under socialism, you will diminish or eradicate supply. When you get rid of freedom and accountability — which is what socialism does — then you get rid of production. It is that simple. The events of 2020 and 2021 have shown us that this rule of human behavior applies even in the United States of America.
For over a year, the government has disrupted economic behavior. It imposed lockdowns, mask mandates, gave out huge unemployment benefits, ordered social distancing and now vaccination requirements. All of these things have led to a disruption in the economic activity that otherwise would have taken place. Witness the results.
Note that the economic disruption was NOT caused by a virus. Viruses have come and gone before. Nothing like this ever happened. What DID happen this time, that has never happened before, are lockdowns, huge unemployment benefits and now vaccination mandates which have also caused an employee shortage because anywhere from 30-50 percent of the population will quit before getting vaccinated.
You cannot do these things to an economy without consequences.
The “economy” is really just an abstraction referring to the transactions and activities of billions of people every day. The “economy” doesn’t care whether the disruption is due to government intervention in the name of socialism, Communism, or a virus. Disruption is disruption. And eventually, we all pay.
The hubris and ignorance among Americans about economics is truly monumental. We don’t have to be economists; most of us aren’t, and that’s OK. Given the quality of most economists today, that’s actually a good thing. But more of us should be able to understand that full shelves don’t happen by accident. And there’s a reason why shelves have always been full in America, while they were never full in Soviet Russia, and are not full today in places like Cuba and Venezuela (the latter of which used to have full shelves).
On our present course, with more and more government intervention in the economy, we can expect more problems. Already we’re seeing inflation, including rising gas prices, as well as slowdowns and shortages. Christmas presents and celebrations are important to millions of people. Those will be disrupted, not because of any virus — but because of economics, i.e, because of government intervention in the economy.
There is no utopia. But in a free market economy — where government does not interfere — there will be the fewest problems possible, and problems will always be temporary. This is because human beings, even at their worst, have rational incentives to improve or correct errors … when they are accountable for their actions. In a free market economy, where there is very little taxation and regulation, but also very few or no bailouts or subsidies, everyone is accountable.
We no longer have that; not like we used to. Shelves fill up for a reason. They get empty for a reason, too. If more Americans don’t learn to accept and grasp this simple fact, we’re going to see a lot more problems — even nightmare scenarios such as widespread starvation or hyperinflation.
I used to think we were only one election from all this happening. History will ultimately tell us if the 2020 election WAS that election.
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Note: Facebook has again suspended my account, this time until Oct. 18. They objected to my sharing a post by Brandon Straka, founder of Walk Away. That post was liked/shared at least 20,000 times, last time I checked, before they took it down. They claim that Straka is violent and dangerous, even though he has only been charged with a misdemeanor and has not been accused by the Biden regime of even entering the U.S. Capitol on January 6. My question: Violent and dangerous — by what definition, and to whom? As my post said: This is not America.