Both Parties Ignore Primary Cause Behind Grocery Store Inflation

“Legal plunder” is just one way state power is used to benefit the few at the expense of the many. Another method the political class uses to extract compliance, acceptance and so on from the private sector is the old-fashioned shakedown.

Consider the case of the panic over egg prices just a few months ago. Egg prices went up – a lot – contributing to inflation. The political class and its hangers-on latched onto egg prices as a sure sign of corporate greed in action.

But reality is a complex and messy thing that often escapes the preferred narratives and shibboleths of right and left. As the Cato Institute’s Scott Lincicome writes, there was a lot going on behind those prices:

…good ol’ supply and demand. Most obviously, the United States in 2022 experienced the worst outbreak of avian influenza ever, with the virus forcing U.S. egg producers to cull around 45 million egg‐​laying birds last year…

Ah yes, the bird flu. It was a particularly bad year for it. And even worse if you happened to be an egg-producing chicken:

Most eggs in the United States are hatched in jam-packed industrial egg farms, where transmission is next to impossible to stop, so the go-to move when the flu is detected is to “depopulate,” the preferred industry term for killing all of the birds. Without such a brutal tactic, Bryan Richards, the emerging-disease coordinator at the U.S. Geological Survey, told me, the current wave would be much worse.

But this strategy also means fewer eggs, at least until new chicks grow into hens. That takes about six months, so there just haven’t been enough hens lately—especially for all the holiday baking people wanted to do, Thompson said. By the end of 2022, the U.S. egg inventory was 29 percent lower than it had been at the beginning of the year. The chicken supply, in contrast, is robust, because avian flu tends to affect older birds, like egg layers, Thompson said; at six to eight weeks old, the birds we eat, known as broilers, are not as susceptible. Also, she added, wild-bird migration pathways are not as concentrated in the Southeast, where most broiler production happens.

The avian flu took the lives of “more than 43 million hens,” which is going to pinch egg supply no matter what.

Left out of the left’s charges of greed and profiteering is an inconvenient bit Reason’s Joe Lancaster noted about egg prices in that long-ago time of 2020, right as the pandemic was getting underway:

…when egg prices plummeted from $2 to $1.32 in mid-2020, [former Labor Secretary Robert] Reich did not argue that this was a result of poultry firms’ generosity and not a side effect of a giant decrease in demand at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Of course not. It’s easier to shout “greed” – and threaten producers – than it is to acknowledge supply and demand’s role in setting prices. Even those of the humble egg.

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of American Liberty News.

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