John Tamny on the root cause of supply chain shortages

Look back to Adam Smith.  I think it's fairly basic here: his opening pages are about a pin factory.  A man alone in a pin factory could maybe produce one pin per day, but a man working with several coworkers where everyone was specializing in that same pin factory could produce tens of thousands.  

So you think about something unsophisticated like that and then consider airplanes and computers and toys.  Imagine the global cooperation of billions of workers entering into trillions of different contractual arrangements over the decades on the way to this global supply and then a political class that thought it needed to guide us away from a virus decided to shut down the most sophisticated the world had ever known.  Is anyone surprised that we've got shortages right now?  

The shortages are a statement of the obvious, but what's offensive is when we call it supply chain shortages or inflation.  No, this was central planning.  This was the imposition of command and control where there had been freedom before.  Let's be very clear about what happened: the political class - Republicans and Democrats and everyone in between - caused this when they went for lockdowns as a virus mitigation strategy.

~ John Tamny, "Key Takeaways from the Annual Stansberry Conference," 43:40 mark, November 4, 2021