PrintBiden invokes Defense Production Act to bring in the baby formula. What could go wrong?
Joe Biden is suddenly serious.
He's taken control. Instead of sending a spokeswoman to laugh off a question about who was "running point" on the baby formula crisis, or telling moms with hungry infants to ask their doctors for free samples, if not call their local community organizer, he's invoked the Defense Production Act to empower the federal government to take control of the baby formula shortages that have come as 50% of baby formula has disappeared from store shelves. That'll fix 'er. Just bring in old Joe Biden, and worry not.
According to Fox News:
Biden invoked the Defense Production Act to ensure that manufacturers have the necessary ingredients to make "safe, healthy infant formula here at home."
"The President is requiring suppliers to direct needed resources to infant formula manufacturers before any other customer who may have ordered that good," the White House said. "Directing firms to prioritize and allocate the production of key infant formula inputs will help increase production and speed up in supply chains."
The White House also announced the launch of its new program, "Operation Fly Formula" to speed up the import of infant formula and get more formula to stores in the United States as soon as possible.
This is weird stuff. Biden created the crisis by allowing his FDA to hamfistedly shut down a major baby formula supplier over safety concerns after several infants got sick and one died after supposedly consuming Abbott's baby formula, a charge the company says was falsely attributed to its formula. Biden hasn't proven otherwise, but the plant, which makes about a third of the formula consumed in the States, stays shut down. The shortages that came of it were something the Bidenite FDA never considered.
Meanwhile, the usual supply chain issues persist, leaving bare shelves in their own right. Transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg is AWOL as usual, claiming that the baby formula shortage to him is "personal," having recently adopted twins. He went AWOL to take care of the twins last summer, and no word on what if anything he's doing.
In targeting the private sector instead of the government he purportedly leads, the one that is obviously at the root of this problem right now, Biden is once again blaming the private sector as the source of the problem. Biden'll now be able to order private formula suppliers to decide which customers to service first over other customers, and get the military to send its cargo contractors overseas to bring in the baby formula from abroad.
-<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Biden takes control over private sector ingredients for use in the manufacture of baby formula. HHS will now control distribution equity.<a href="https://t.co/5yNggrXYSv">https://t.co/5yNggrXYSv</a></p>— TheLastRefuge (@TheLastRefuge2) <a href="https://twitter.com/TheLastRefuge2/status/1527074368999899137?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">May 18, 2022</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>8"></script>
This, from the same guy who invoked the release of half the Strategic Petroleum Reserve as his solution to the massive spike in prices at the pump, and whose administration declared the rampant inflation hitting the system first "transitory," then a rich man's problem, then a problem of price-gouging, then a matter of "corporate greed" and "greedy oil companies" and not enough taxation. Once again, it's those bad private-sector guys, not the monster government that keeps expanding and spending to the point that there's not enough economic activity to render useful all the federal money-printing that gets released into the system from it. Feel confident he's got the baby formula shortage in hand?
It goes to the problem of central planning, and centrally planned economies — as described by Austrian economist F.A. Hayek:
Hayek argues that central planning cannot work because not only lack the tacit and local knowledge needed to allocate resources, but also the knowledge needed to allocate resources isn’t available to them; that knowledge is communicated in a market via prices — knowledge, which the process itself creates.
Joe never got that memo. Like any leftist, he's all in for central planning and command economies. The fact that he's a dotard with a monstrously failing track record doesn't deter him in the least. But everyone else out there can see what Joe doesn't: that he doesn't know what he's doing. That will buy him some good public relations for a day or two from the press, and more failure as the results of this lame-brained plan kick in and the shelves hold less and less.
