“The Biden administration,” Eric Garcia reports at The Independent, “is attempting to shift the blame for the nation’s current supply chain crisis at the feet of the Trump administration as the nation faces a series of problems with shipping.” White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain refers, in a tweet, to the traffic jam at US ports as “like many other problems we have inherited.”
Naturally, Trump’s having none of it. “COVID is raging out of control, our supply chains are crashing with little product in our stores, we were humiliated in Afghanistan, our border is a complete disaster, gas prices and inflation are zooming upward — how’s Biden doing? Do you miss me yet?”
Klain and Trump both omit the inconvenient fact that where actual policy is concerned — on COVID-19, on trade, on the economy, on Afghanistan (the one bright spot), on travel and immigration — Biden has thrown himself with gusto into serving Trump’s second term.
After four years of trade wars and 18 months of trashing various sectors of the economy in the name of “fighting COVID-19,” all while cranking up the fiat currency printing press and handing out fat stacks of money to all comers, the US government has attracted a flock of chickens home to roost their tailfeathers over the American economy.
Not real chickens, mind you. Poultry is in such short supply that WingStop has re-branded itself as ThighStop “to combat the volatility of chicken wing pricing.”
Ships are stacking up outside US ports, without enough longshoremen to unload them or truck drivers to haul the cargo off to store shelves. Health care workers are getting fired over, and Southwest Airlines pilots are conducting a wildcat strike over, vaccine mandates, even though Biden’s proposed OSHA rule has yet to actually go into effect.
In my January 19 column, I predicted that the Biden administration would be “business as usual, as usual.” I was wrong. It’s business as usual on steroids.
Government is always a drag on an economy. Every dollar it spends — after looting it from your paycheck or borrowing it in your name — is an “investment” in making us all poorer than we’d have been if left to run our own lives. Every rule it comes up with makes it harder for us to prosper.
Usually, however, we produce wealth faster than a Trump or Biden can steal it and blow it. Years of terrible trade and economic policy, combined with the eagerness of politicians to expand their power by currying and exploiting mass hysteria over COVID-19, have reversed that equation.
Government was always too expensive, but now we’ve reached the point where we clearly can’t afford it at all anymore. Not if we want to survive, anyway.
Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.
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