Photo credit: JVG

The baby-formula shortage is just the latest in a string of economic troubles that are showing us all just how unjust an unregulated free market can be. We don’t actually want a free-for-all system, and we’re just waking up to that, crisis-by-crisis.

I took this photo at my local grocery store in March 2020, when the entire nation was freaking out about toilet paper. Two years later, I am not sure exactly why that was the one household item we were convinced we would run out of should economic chaos ensue as this unknown virus ripped through our cities and towns. Were we not concerned about milk? Baby formula? Were we not concerned about rice or bread? Cough drops? Batteries? We were very concerned about how we would wipe our ass. (Ah, yes! It was because we were no longer using the bathroom at work.)

It is hard to put your brain and heart back in March 2020. The world has changed in utterly disgusting ways in a matter of just two years. Sure, that change started way before, but for most of us, the pandemic was a knockout punch to our old way of life. We can tout the nation’s “economic recovery” all we want in the name of confidence-building and political strategy, but for the majority of us who did not have the protection of being in the 1%, all media coverage of a robust recovery is laughable. Sickening. Delusional. We know the real story: the economic pain still hurts like a fresh wound.

Here in New York City, every other store is for rent, and what’s been vacant for two years is now a pot shop (two on my block); commuters have not returned, which has wiped out an entire economic layer of food vendors, dry cleaners, groomers — anyone who served the two million people who flooded in and out of the city every day; and a powerful narrative has spread across the tri-state area that the city is a frightening, eroded shell of what it once was. Yet, rents are up, home prices are up, and prices are skyrocketing. You can’t leave your house now without spending $50 on dinner — and that’s at the shittiest of places.

Inflation is up because there is little competition in the marketplace to keep it in check. Plainly put, consumers just don’t have a choice but to pay these prices. You can blame Joe Biden all you want, but that’s like blaming the school principal that your kid got punched in the face by another third-grader. Sure, the safety of your child is his responsibility, but the punch came from the kid. Americans are getting punched, smacked, kicked, and thumped every day, while ignoring the fact that it is Big Business that is raising prices. The Great American Brands blame supply chains; they blame Ukraine; they blame rising costs. But their profits are skyrocketing as Americans suffer.

And now, mothers can’t get baby formula. We’ve all seen the reports and been following this infuriating story. Abbott Labs found certain batches of their baby formula were poisonous, so they shut down the plant. So, on top of a war across the world that is fucking up oil prices, and a 50-year old ban on abortion being overturned, and millions of small-business owners being cheated out of emergency relief by their own government, we can’t feed our own infants. Oh, and some kid has an AR-15 at a local grocery and is shooting up the place.* Are you fucking kidding? The pile-on of the last few weeks alone has been nothing short of dystopian.

[*No, an unregulated free market did not make the shooter kill people, but an unregulated media (that got rid of the Fairness Doctrine) inspired it, an unregulated gun market (that resists policies that a majority of American support) gave him the gun, and unregulated social-media platforms (that have washed their hands of responsibility) continue to prey on and harm the emotional lives of our kids. We can talk about freedom all day long, but common-sense rules and structure do not impede freedom. They allow it to grow.]

The baby-formula shortage, though, is just one more pearl in the beautiful string of economic crises in our lifetimes that is showing Americans what an unregulated free market truly is: dangerous.

Without regulations (uh, rules), antitrust enforcement, or a silly thing like consequences for consumer abuse, the economy is a free-for-all that benefits Big Business and screws the little guy. And at this point, more than 90% of us are “the little guy.” Without meaningful guardrails in place — which have been systematically eliminated by pro-business interests over decades — we get consolidation and an elimination of competition. What does that look like? Here is what it looks like in the food industry: ten mega-corporations control everything we eat. Same in cable and entertainment. Same in cars. Same in airlines. Same in pharma. Same in the seeds used to grow the food you will eat today.

And now, apparently, same in baby formula. Three companies control 95 percent of baby formula sales, in a nation of 334 million people.

Our unabashed loyalty to the free market is killing us. Literally. During Covid, that loyalty looked like a president who would not harness the power of the government to help his people. He did not want government to interfere with the free market. Instead of immediately employing the Defense Production Act and manufacturing masks, test kits, and the like here at home, he waited for the free market to kick in. Financial incentives had to align so that free enterprise would make testing readily available. A market had to be created, as if the virus hadn’t done that overnight. A product needed to be rolled out. Someone had to profit.

Two years later, Covid test tents are on every corner here in New York. (By contrast, in the former Yugoslavia, where I visited my boyfriend’s family when it was finally relatively safe to fly, they were up instantly.) In the meantime, the incoming government sent two free kits to our homes. That took nearly a year. What an utter disgrace on the right and on the left. Our unwillingness to use the tools and levers of government for the public good cost us lives. Our loyalty to the economy — to business — killed people. Period.

Loud calls are coming into the White House again for Biden to use the Defense Production Act to solve the baby formula shortage. And, again, it is that same delusional loyalty that has caused the baby formula shortage. It is the same loyalty that caused the 2008 financial crisis. It is the same loyalty that has destroyed Main Street, small business, and the American Middle Class. We have dismantled decades of regulations in the name of the free market. In modern America, the free market must rein completely unencumbered by frivolous things like rules, structure, and accountability.

That modern magical free market that operates without significant regulations has given us some major problems: income inequality at unsustainable and abhorrent levels, a Covid disaster that killed hundreds of thousands of people it could have saved, a two-year supply-chain crisis, massive unemployment, painful inflation, an angry working class that is now just starting to unionize and fight back, and now a shortage of the very formula it takes to keep babies alive. Babies. Alive. The same country that is about to force women to carry a child to term — despite rape or incest — cannot keep the shelves stocked with the necessities to keep that child eating and breathing.

Consumers don’t actually want a completly free market. We want a more responsible free market. We want someone to be held to account. Someone to point a finger at when something goes wrong. We want honorable actors and a healthy and dynamic economy. We want someone with our interests at heart to be in charge, to set rules, to hold people’s feet to the fire to do the right thing so we can all prosper. Instead, as this baby-formula crisis is showing, and as each passing social and economic crisis continues to show us, we have a system of “it’s not my problem,” “I didn’t do,” “don’t look at me.” This is what happens with no rules and no will to balance the scales. Americans are starting to really understand what unregulated free market means: mayhem.