“Supply chains cannot tolerate even 24 hours of disruption. So if you lose your place in the supply chain because of wild behavior you could lose a lot. It would be like pouring cement down one of your oil wells.” – Thomas Friedman
Have you noticed the dwindling shelves at the grocery store? Are you still waiting on product orders placed months ago? In our household, this is a regular observation. School uniform items like pants and shirts that we ordered for our children last Summer took the better part of four to five months to arrive, and we were left scrambling for approved apparel for them to wear to school this past Fall. This phenomenon is not limited to school uniforms or grocery items either.
In October of last year, I penned an op-ed about societal planners actively working to disrupt supply chains and devalue currencies in pursuit of a reimagination of global capitalism. At every point during the last few years, they have advertised their intent, utilizing corporate finance publications like Forbes and Bloomberg to sell their vision of a new system with themselves positioned comfortably at the top. Others like The Hill advertised the Biden Administration’s devotion to this vision of a new capitalism.
There was always going to be a correction after our ill-advised COVID retreat policies. Locking down supply chains in an attempt to run from viral contagion based on a high school experiment was never going to be without consequence. Perhaps our greatest error was allowing these policies to persist unfettered for as long as we did? Earlier course correction may have saved us from our current trajectory. Recent reports of economic indicators saw inflation climb to 6.8 percent, the highest rate in forty years, and 4.5 million people quit their jobs in anticipation of OSHA-enforced vaccination policies, the highest number ever recorded.
Have you heard the phrase about kicking someone when they’re down? That seems a fitting description of the Biden Administration’s policy positions. Build Back Better? No, Kick Them When They’re Down! So many of our mistakes seem to be forced errors. Our economic indicators have been trending the wrong way for the better part of the first year of the Biden Administration, and so chalking these policies up to ineptitude seems gracious at best.
When the Supreme Court recently scrapped the Biden Administration’s OSHA vaccine mandate in the private sector, the Biden Administration didn’t abandon their misguided policy. Rather than move on they merely redirected their focus toward those whom they still held the authority to bully. In this case, healthcare workers and international truckers became the new targets of the Biden Administration at a time when we’re short eighty-thousand truckers and 1 in 5 US healthcare workers quit with mandates pending. As a response, US and Canadian truckers have parked their rigs at US borders and assembled a convoy in protest.
In a time of major goods and labor supply crunch, implementing new choke points on the supply chain can’t simply be dismissed as inept and reads more like malicious policy. When every policy response exacerbates the circumstances in which we find ourselves, it’s hard to see them as anything but disdain toward the American workforce. Then from time to time a policy response that borders on the absurd is floated or introduced and one is left considering that maybe the Biden Administration truly is inept?
One such example is the administration’s response following their suspension of truckers. They have proposed an apprenticeship program to put teenagers behind the wheel of big rigs. Don’t get me wrong, I am an ardent supporter of apprenticeship programs and believe that they’re far better for career training than what most government schools deliver. Still, putting trillions in supply in the hands of novice teenage drivers versus relaxing regulation and letting seasoned drivers do what they do in the short term seems every bit as irrational as it sounds.
Many economists are predicting that the global supply chain may never recover from our current predicament, and perhaps that would be by design for those who wish to reimagine global commerce? One is certainly left questioning if that is the objective of the Biden Administration. The rest of us are left asking, why can’t they return? Supply chains are just mechanisms of facilitating supply and demand, and all of the pieces that existed before our pandemic response remain. People still require goods and services, and businesses still require meeting those demands to flourish.
Photo by Avi Richards on Unsplash
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