To be sure, I’m not suggesting the government’s job is buying or distributing formula for mothers.* The role of government is to protect the marketplace, property, and contract law; not interfere with the supply and demand curves (the crossing of which is the price; in case you’re a lefty and learned all you know about economics in sociology class). Let free enterprise spontaneously supply the right quantities of formula demanded at the right time and place at the lowest profitable cost possible. There is a lot of money to be made in formula right because the current suppliers have dropped the ball and so enterprise will naturally flow to it quickly to make the profit.
Policy should be (and this is the key point of Reaganomics) to create the conditions favorable to increased supply. Regan’s ‘supply-side economics’ is focused on production. Its economists understand that wealth is created through production and often exhausted through consumption. Reaganites understood that supply (production) creates its own demand, and that until you produce something you’ll have no money to demand or buy anything. The left touts demand-side economics, which favors increased consumption, usually by government ‘stimulus’. It is the political economics of demands without consequence, and often behaves as if the money to pay for all the demands comes from some mysterious, inexhaustible fifth dimension and nobody ever will have to pay the piper.
The best thing government can do is stay out of the way of the people in the biz who know what they’re doing. However, there’s a point of crisis at which the best thing the government can do is mobilize. This always comes at a long-term cost in money and loss of liberty. And that’s why the left—which always favors increasing the size and scope of government—has incentives to create or permit crises. They’re always eager to “never let a crisis go to waste.”
When we realize that most of these crises were planned, or at least the created conditions were favorable to just these kinds of crises, then we’ll get our freedom, our formula, and our low prices built back better. But like the WSJ penned yesterday, this president is like Costanza in Seinfeld who should do the complete opposite of what he thinks he should.
*I’d prefer to get the government out of the charity business entirely, but alas, it has had the role so long the best thing for now is to reform it.