Tomato juice is one of my favorite lubricants, and while Campbell's @ $4.50 a jar may be very fine, I can't distinguish betweeen it and the store's own-label rival @ $1.50, so for Lo! these many years, I've chosen the latter. But currently, it has been missing from the shelf for five successive weeks.

In ordinary times, the manager responsible for such an anomaly for a staple item would have been on the carpet; but these are not ordinary times. A giant wrench has been tossed into the smooth machinery of the free-ish market.

For fifty years or more, businesses large and small, in manufacturing and distribution, have been able to use a method known as "just in time." The idea is that a fresh supply of needed parts, or merchandise, arrives very shortly before the existing inventory runs out. The factors, estimates and calculations needed to achieve this balancing act are formidable, which is why it has been perfected mainly since 1970; for this is the computer era.

When they measure and store demand or usage and supply lead-time data, the magic machines can figure out in a flash when to place replenishment orders which get filled... just in time. It's a system that benefits all, by minimizing the time that Valuable Stuff lies idly on the shelf, waiting for someone to pluck it off but meanwhile wasting valuable capital. Net effect: more profit, lower prices, plentiful supply. The market at work. It's called the "supply chain."

Here are the multiple monkeywrenches that government has tossed in to that machine, over and above its usual intrusions with taxes and regulations. Just in the last couple of years. Note: it's not just the US gang; it's almost the lot of them, led by the industrial front-runners in NATO.

First a new and dangerous bug was announced, and I still cannot tell whether the Covid virus is real or fictional, for it has still not been isolated and tested for conformity to the Koch Postulates. So alarm and fear was spread among the people. Then came the mandates; to conceal the face, making us less personal, more manipulable; then orders to stay home and to close businesses (other than the biggest ones, more favored as sources of campaign donations.) So all over the commercial map, suppliers of goods and services in the delicate flow of supply were savagely disrupted; "just in time" became "maybe, if we can."

Worse yet, the NATO front-runners set an example of intimidation that other governments mimicked; Sweden (then outside the cartel) was a late starter, and never did impose lock-downs. Not even schools were closed, yet not a single child died of Covid. Russia, India and Brazil lined up next, in mid-2020.

Now, because of earlier intrusions into the market which forced the cost of labor up beyond its true value, US manufacturers had moved labor-intensive work overseas; so the interruptions to the flow of parts and products from 2020 has been disrupted by lockdowns at different, random times! This worsened the mess.

Government then (in 2021) gave the shambles another twist by handing out free money, called "stimulus." This had two effects. One, it caused the inflation we are now experiencing, for creation of currency always raises prices after a little time has passed. And two, it gave an extra incentive for employees a few years from retirement to stay home even after the lockdowns were lifted, rather than try to get a new job when 60 years old; why not smell the roses and await Social Security? I wonder if unemployment and labor shortages have ever previously coincided.

Now and for the past year, therefore, we have the ridiculous situation that firms are trying hard to rebuild from the wreckage, but are hindered by lack of labor - even after millions had lost their jobs! - because government interference has shrunk the work force.

To add to the ruin, this year the NATO governments slapped savage restrictions of trade on Russia, which had produced one-seventh of all the world's oil, and the cutoff has lifted gasoline prices 65%, producing yet further disruptions in all sections of business. Alleged-President Biden has noticed that this hike may hurt his Party's chances in the Fall elections, so this month we have the world's most powerful "leader" going a-begging in the sandy kingdom of Arabia, to ask them to open their spigots after he himself closed the ones in Russia. At the same time, he's opened the US Strategic Reserve; if that lowers gas prices in time for the voting, the Reserve may well be drained.

All this is a textbook case of massive dysfunction. Was it just blundering incompetence, or deliberate destruction? I think, the latter. Either way, after government has vanished for want of employees, the question will be moot.