By Kevin D. Williamson
Tuesday, May 17, 2022
On The Editors podcast, my friend Michael Brendan Dougherty observed that one possible way to mitigate the baby-formula shortage would be for the FDA to speed up certification of overseas factories.
That’s a great idea. An even better idea would be to agree on standards and protocols for such certification years before there is any such crisis — which is what free-trade deals are for.
People sometimes complain that free-trade deals are thousands and thousands of pages rather than a single-page memo reading, “There shall be free trade between x and y.” This is why those documents and relationships are so complex.
FDA regulations come under the category of “technical barriers to trade,” which include things like health-and-safety regulations, restrictions on government purchases related to national security, that sort of thing. Nobody thinks that it is an unreasonable restriction on trade that the U.S. government doesn’t want to rely on Chinese makers for sensitive equipment used by our intelligence agencies or prefers that the army’s rifles be made in U.S. factories. But what about foreign-made boots or sleeping bags or tents? Is it acceptable for the U.S. government to favor domestic suppliers over Mexican competitors? Is it acceptable for the Mexican government to favor domestic suppliers of U.S. competitors? In which circumstances? Subject to what limits? How do we go about handling inspection and oversight for imported food or pharmaceuticals in such a way as to avoid creating unnecessary barriers to trade and duplicative regulation? How do we ensure that our trade partners do not disadvantage U.S.-made goods under regulatory pretexts?
That is why the USMCA is 2,082 pages. I don’t think that any sensible person really worries that baby formula made to Swiss specifications or to European Union specifications would be unsafe — if anything, our European friends often have more-stringent regulations than we do. But if you do not have a protocol worked out and agreed to in advance, then you are left trying to work something out during a crisis — which is the wrong way to do things.
The more buyers and sellers you have in any market, the more competitive and efficient the market is. (Generally.) The more producers and commercial relationships you have in any given industry, and the greater the diversity of these, the more resilient that industry is.
Free trade is a great way to avoid unnecessarily putting yourself in the dumb situation in which a disruption involving a single factory or a single firm must have massive effects throughout the market. What we are suffering from right now in particular is a shortage of baby formula, but what we are suffering from in a more general sense is trade restriction.
Think about this: If you are coming back into the United States from Europe and attempt to bring a cannister of French baby formula with you, the government will seize it in order to protect the nation from . . . something. From the horrifying third-world standards of . . . Belgium and Austria? Who can forget the recent images of Vienna and Brussels, their citizens stricken by poisoned food and defective medicines? I suppose that may have happened, but not very often since 1814 or thereabouts.
Most shortages are artificial, self-inflicted difficulties created by dumb policy. This is fixable.
Glad to have MBD on board. I had thought he might be unpersuadable.
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