Josh Hawley Is Of Small Mind That Can't Make Its Way To The Unintended Consequences
I'm still somewhat amazed by how many utter idiots are elected by purportedly mentally competent voters.

They unceasingly fail to think through (or ring a person who can think through) the possible consequences of their proposals.

Of course, sometimes what those of us who are rational see as an awful consequence, idiot politicians see as a positive -- if it, say, runs counter to capitalist principles (that have done more to raise people out of poverty globally than anything else).

Eric Boehm writes at Reason:

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) has a plan to address the current supply chain issues bedeviling the American economy.

He wants to make them permanent.

In an op-ed for The New York Times published Friday, Hawley uses the temporary supply chain problems as an excuse to push for a permanent expansion of federal power over the affairs of private businesses. We must "fundamentally restructure our country's trade policy," Hawley demands, and that means injecting both the Pentagon and Commerce Department bureaucrats into companies' purchasing decisions. Under the terms of a bill that Hawley is proposing, any product determined to be "critical for our national security and essential for the protection of our industrial base" would have to have at least 50 percent of its value made in the United States.

Why is it necessary for the government to get significantly more involved in the system of global trade that's allowed Americans to enjoy unparalleled prosperity in recent years? Because "the global pandemic has exposed this system for what it is--a failure," Hawley writes.

One must assume that if the lights in his home went out due to a storm, Hawley would respond by declaring electricity to be a mistake and demanding that the government require homes to be lit with candles and gas lamps. After all, what is the electrical grid but a complicated supply chain that leaves Americans woefully dependent on production and distribution systems (power plants, substations, and lines) that they do not fully control? Better to produce your own lighting, right? If that means you have to live without television or the internet, well, those are just the trade-offs required to achieve self-sufficiency.

A storm--or a pandemic--can create temporary problems in the highly complex systems that run so much of the modern world. That's hardly a reason to abandon them. If Hawley is imagining a world in which the United States is wholly self-sufficient, then he's asking you to accept a scenario in which the United States is significantly poorer than it is today.

"The supply chain for an Apple iPhone crosses an international border more than 600 times, and if it didn't, you probably wouldn't have one--it would be too expensive," writes Mario Loyola, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, in an op-ed (paywalled...sigh) for National Review that does a much better job than Hawley's of outlining the true culprits of the supply chain nightmare.

...As Scott Lincicome, a senior fellow with the Cato Institute, points out, the vast majority of food consumed in the United States is grown, raised, and otherwise produced here. And yet Americans are seeing higher prices and supply issues at the grocery store too.

"That a mostly‐​domestic U.S. food supply chain hasn't protected American consumers from recent shortages and price increases is unsurprising," Lincicome writes. "For starters, many of the same things that stress global supply chains--COVID-19 outbreaks; supply‐​demand imbalances; labor shortages in the trucking and warehousing industries; misguided trade, transportation, and immigration policies; etc.--stress domestic ones too."

Hawley's proposal, therefore, would be ineffective at best. At worst, it would impose new barriers between producers and consumers, beef up the regulatory power of the federal government, and arbitrarily ban products that Americans would otherwise choose to purchase. Hawley's ideas won't resolve the supply chain problems plaguing America; they would make empty store shelves the new normal.