It's Not That 'Mayor Pete' is an Amateur...

... it's that he accepted Mission Impossible.

An article in The Hill dings the Transportation Secretary and the President by implication for poorly handling the current spate of shortages and supply chain issues that started during the pandemic and have only worsened.

I am no fan of Pete Buttigieg or Joe Biden, but this line of criticism is neither fair nor accurate: There is no such thing as a person or even a government that is "qualified" to run an entire economy, and the whole idea is ridiculous. I have quoted the economist George Reisman on this numerous times before, and I'll do it again:

Image by U.S. Dept. of Transportation, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

The overwhelming majority of people have not realized that all the thinking and planning about their economic activities that they perform in their capacity as individuals actually is economic planning. By the same token, the term "planning" has been reserved for the feeble efforts of a comparative handful of government officials, who, having prohibited the planning of everyone else, presume to substitute their knowledge and intelligence for the knowledge and intelligence of tens of millions, and to call that planning. (as quoted in Andrew Bernstein's Capitalist Manifesto, p. 345) [bold added]

This is in no way intended to let Buttigieg or Biden off the hook: They subscribe to the incorrect view that government can run the economy and to the morally bankrupt view that it should, overriding our individual judgement and our freedom in the process.

It was this anti-freedom notion that led to the disgraceful and disastrous combination of "lockdowns," redistribution, and inflation (but I repeat myself) here and abroad that threw numerous monkey wrenches into the world economy in the first place. These immediately caused obvious problems; the current shortages are knock-on effects of those, and will not be helped by more rights-violating and heavy-handed attempts to "fix" them by the likes of Buttigieg or Biden.

It is for those things that we should roundly condemn the Democrats (and any Republicans who attack them on the grounds of "incompetence"), while offering the superior alternative of freedom -- rather than merely carping that a small town mayor can't solve all our problems, as if any central planner could.

-- CAV