GO BUILD YOUR OWN SUPPLY CHAIN.

Let's begin with a study question from Alchian and Allen's University Economics.

It is estimated that 25 percent of the price a housewife pays for a head of lettuce goes to the farmer, while the remaining portion is for middlemen and distribution costs.

a.  Would you, as a farmer, necessarily prefer to have your percentage raised?  Explain why not.
b.  Would you, as a consumer, prefer to see his percentage raised? Explain.

At least during the growing season, consumers have the option of raising the percentage the farmer takes by patronizing a farmers' market, or patronizing a roadside stand where farmers set such up.

Let us continue with a passage from the July 1976 Progressive (yes, the housecleaning continues, slowly) penned by Alice Shabecoff, who doesn't like that percentage.

We have gone from simple, staple foods to convenience, luxury, processed, chemicalized, and variegated products, such as coffee lightener and midwinter strawberries.  In 1947, 80 per cent of all chickens were processed for sale by removing only their blood and feathers; in the early 1960s, chickens were sold as eviscerated, ice-packed, ready-to-eat whole birds, and 1 percent of the chicken sales dollar was spent to advertise the product; today, most chicken is sold cut and packaged by parts, or in prepared dishes such as TV "dinners" - and 9 percent of the sales dollar goes to advertising.

Processing those chickens, packaging them, amalgamating bits of them into TV dinners, distributing and advertising the end result are the steps which constitute that part of the food system called "the middleman" sector.

It is the middleman sector that has been the principal component in the inexorable rise in food prices from year to year.

Let us be grateful time travel is not possible, otherwise whoever Alice Shabecoff is could be haunted by the spectre of Tucker Carlson going to finishing school on that Swanson money.  On the other hand, by 1976, she, or her next-younger-sisters-in-struggle, might well have been able to contemplate roles for themselves other than "homemaker," which entails a lot of working with those not-so-processed chickens, and then to make an issue about the notion that the housewife was buying the groceries, fairly standard usage when University Economics came out in 1964.

Let us also consider where the self-styled progressives wanted to take us.

America has no national food policy, no measure of what is needed at home or abroad, no ways in which what is needed at home or abroad, no ways in which to meet those needs.

A rational food policy would address questions of additives, processing, and nutrition.   It would ensure an adequate diet for every American, set an adequate income for farmers and farm workers, ensure reserves in times of emergencies, and provide food for the world's hungry.

Sure it would.  Let's finish the job the corona shutdowns have started on the developing world, by dumpling our excess reserves on them.

Right now, dear reader, if you want to have Christmas without any middlemen, have at it!

The White House has been trying to tackle inflation-inducing supply bottlenecks of everything from meat to semiconductors, and formed a task force in June that meets weekly and named a "bottleneck" czar to push private-sector companies to ease snarls.

Biden himself plans to meet with top executives from retail giants Wal-Mart Inc (WMT.N) and Home Depot Inc (HD.N) and with unions and other stakeholders on Wednesday to discuss efforts to relieve transportation bottlenecks before delivering a speech on the topic.

Isn't a bottleneck czar just another sort of middleman, and not in a good way?  Somehow, though, the notion of national policies and Experts In Charge continues to have appeal.