Chicken Scarcity
Yes, bird flu is a contributing factor, but the larger factor is a number of chicken processing plants being shut down because they violated health and safety laws. Laws that were eased or halted for three or four years and just now reinstituted using common sense. Only it was too late, people got sick from bad chicken.
The biggest contribution though is monopoly, when there are only three companies left that provide nearly the entirety of the market share, they can more easily agree to fix prices and neutralize any burgeoning competition.
Baby Formula Scarcity
See above and substitute mentions of chicken with Baby Formula.
Refined Gasoline Scarcity
See above and substitute easing of regulations with nearly erasing them.
We had four years with a moron in the big chair howling his head off about how government interference slowed and impeded business. As it turns out, like in all things, Orange Jesus was dead fucking wrong. We will continue to have scarcity and suffer droughts in product because businesses in this country were, in many cases, left to self-supervise as whole fields of review and intervention were purposefully defunded or impeded.
We’ve also had nearly thirty years of our anti-monopoly laws being eroded and evaded until they are nothing but mere suggestions. You know, the laws that were enshrined after the horrors of the business excesses of the 1920’s and the resulting crash that occurred.
Government oversight and intervention of U.S. businesses is absolutely imperative. You CANNOT expect publicly traded businesses to act ethically. You CANNOT pretend that the chief officers will act in ANYONE’S interests besides the shareholder. This concept goes double for medicine, which was once a noble trade held separate from the devils arithmetic for a fucking reason. Which brings me to the burgeoning issue of medical attention scarcity.