This does not bode well:

President Biden has invoked emergency powers to hasten the production of baby milk as the US scrambles to address the disappearance of almost half of the products from the shelves and a panic among parents.

Assuming authority under the Defence Production Act, which gives the government sweeping powers to direct industries

The point of the Defence Production Act - and other similar emergency powers worldwide - is to do an end run around those boring liberty, freedom and property things when there truly is an emergency. If the Parisian hordes were indeed about the ransack Dover then yes, it might be valid to allow government to direct more of life than they normally do.

But once government has a power it doesn’t remain an emergency one limited only to extreme circumstances. There is a problem with baby formula in the US and it’s one that’s easily solved, just prevent the FDA from not allowing imports. As so often, the solution to a government problem is that government should stop doing what it currently does. But instead we’ve this invocation of the Defence Production Act.

This allows the Feds to sidestep all of the usual controls and restrictions on the exercise of that government power. To beat Hitler and Tojo that might be fair enough. To sort out the FDA’s restrictions on the labelling of artificial moo juice might be thought a fairly trivial invocation.

But then that’s the warning. Once these powers exist then they will be used for ever more trivial definitions of “emergency” and so our freedoms and liberties will die.

There are, after all, both here and in the US, calls for the declaration of a “climate emergecny”. Which would mean exactly those restrictions of civil liberty so that the enthusiasts could do as they wish.

The simple existence of emergency powers does not bode well over the long term.