Shortages and price hikes were brought to life through bad public policy coupled with decades of corporate greed. “Ships” barely conveys the scale of these giants, which are more like floating Empire State Buildings, stacked high with multicolored containers filled to the brim with toys and clothes and electronics, produced mostly in Asia. They consist of dozens of ships with billions of dollars of cargo, idling outside the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, the docks through which 40 percent of all U.S. Yet we have breadlines in America today, or at least just off our coasts. Otherwise, capitalism has your every desire covered. Only deviating from free-market fundamentalism-giving everyone health care, for example-could lead to shortages.

Supply would always rise to meet demand, as long as there’s money to be made. Warning Americans about life under communism, these clips showed Russian citizens lingering forlornly outside businesses for hours to obtain basic goods-indelible proof of the inferiority of central planning, and an advertisement for capitalism’s abundance.īreadlines, the Big Book of Capitalism assured us, could not happen in a market economy. television at the time: the Soviet breadline. This article appears in The American Prospect magazine’s February 2022 special issue, “How We Broke the Supply Chain.” Subscribe here.Īnyone old enough to remember the Cold War is familiar with a scene routinely depicted on U.S.

Capitalism lab scripts