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Comment by VictorPath | Hacker News Reader

Reason is correct that tariffs on Canada, pushed by Abbott, helped exacerbate the baby formula problem.

This is what happens when heirs and corporations gain too much power. When they are not responsive to working people or the government. Not only are they unresponsive to the government, they buy the government, and get rulings like Citizens United to buy the government even more.

All of this is the result of what Reason has been pushing forever. They wanted to prevent government from dealing with Abbott, and the result is these tariffs and the baby formula breakdown. The market is incapable of working due to the policies of Reason. It's like the bread shortages in the USSR after the failure of Khruschev's Virgin Lands program. Different mechanisms but same result.

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The government has, in fact, been "dealing with Abbot" -- specifically, by imposing anti-competitive tariffs and locking out both foreign and domestic competition. You want them to do more of that? Because, empirically, that's the kind of thing governments tend to do all the time. (See also: regulatory capture and the idea of "concentrated benefits and diffuse costs" in public choice theory.)

Yeah, I think some people/groups like Reason often see government as mostly ineffective and then say we should give them less money, which can make them more ineffective, and then they say they're even more ineffective so we should give less money, so on and so forth. I was reading elsewhere that stronger FDA regulation and enforcement could help fix issues like this one with the baby formula yet many libertarian perspectives don't seem to want to give more power to the government. I don't know.

The govt isn’t ineffective it’s very effective at making the free market ineffective which is what the reason crowd wants to defund.

I live in South America, taxes are 10% and there’s no shortage of formula.

> I live in South America, taxes are 10% and there’s no shortage of formula.

There doesn't seem to be a shortage in Europe either, where taxes are much higher and with your argument, the government may be even more effective.

It's an argument I seem to hear often: government is simultaneously all powerful and completely ineffective.

But I'll stay open and curious: what did the US government do to primarily or fully cause a shortage of infant formula?

Well maybe you should just ban Reason magazine then. Afterall, they don't have 1st amendment protection since 'Reason' is owned by a foundation, and not a person.

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