File Under "Obvious"

As I'm driving home the other day, listening to the financial news (I confess to being a talk-radio crackhead, and our own 580 CFRA is one of the best I've heard on the net or in the cities I've visited) a report on the growing cement shortage in the US describes the impact its having on construction projects and the booming housing market. My civil engineering curiousity piqued, I listen to the explanations for why an all-out crisis is looming: lag times in getting new cement plants up and running, delays in building ships to transport bulk cement, demand in China and the reconstruction efforts in Iraq gobbling up available supply and finally (aha!)...the punitive tariffs on importing Mexican cement may also be to blame.

Those would be the absolutely insane $57 a ton tariffs put in place in the early 90's to thwart "dumping" of cheap Mexican cement into the American market. So thanks to the determined lobbying efforts of a politically connected industry, concentrated benefits are being reaped in exchange for massively diffused costs throughout the entire economy. Whatever highly visible jobs and economic benefits were "saved" through the tariffs have come at the expense of unseen jobs and economic benefits in the construction industry.

Milton Friedman once said that if the federal government were put in charge of the Sahara desert, in five years there would be a shortage of sand. Unfortunately for the rest of us, the government keeps proving him right.
# 1:54 PM