Mr. Chips Explains Shrinkflation
Joe Biden's Superbowl Sunday denunciation of Big Snacks was oh, so progressive
The commentary and criticism that followed President Biden’s decision not to take advantage of a Superbowl interview opportunity must have touched a nerve. As things turned out, he showed up after all, in a prerecorded campaign spot to inform the American people about his fed-upness with—Big Snacks.
Whoever originated the idea that a presidential statement devoted to “shrinkflation” was a good way for the President to connect with the American people has more cognitive problems than the President himself. The spectacle of Joe Biden blathering on about the evils of fewer snack crackers in the package—as if that represents some grave national crisis—was painful and embarrassing. It was a lucky thing for the President that there was no Republican response, perhaps lauding Big Snacks for doing its bit in the war on obesity.
I get what the Biden & Co. were trying to do with this ridiculous performance: blame inflation and high prices on “corporate greed.” Superbowl Sunday was not the first time that line has been tried. Late last year, Biden was heard complaining that while he’d brought inflation down, prices were still high. This prize piece of idiocy fell flat, however. A lower rate of inflation is good because it slows the rate at which prices are increasing. A reduction in prices would be deflation, which as the Great Depression demonstrated is not necessarily a good thing. In any case, Biden’s complaint was not accompanied by explanations as to what, if anything, he proposed to do about the problem.
Corporations, of course, occupy a prominent position in the demonology of the Left, which threatens constantly to prosecute them, tax them into oblivion, break them up. But the comrades devote curiously little thought to the people who work for corporations, or the investors large and small whose money capitalizes them. That Beelzebub of corporate evil, Amazon, employs around a million and a half people, and is capitalized to the tune of $1.75 trillion. What would happen to those people and that money if idiots like Senator Bernie Sanders, Bolshevik of Vermont, got his way and bulldozed the company into the ground?
One of the dumbest criticisms of corporations—heard nowadays in the Right as well as the Left—that that the law treats corporations like human beings. The implication is that corporations are soulless entities, a kind of alien species like the Borg, and that granting them due process of law is outrageous.
But corporations are aggregations of people, brought together for common purposes, mostly involving money. Anything that affects the corporation affects numerous individuals. The legal rights given to corporations, therefore, extend to the individuals connected to it, be they investors, corporate managers, or employees.
None of the foregoing observations are intended to suggest that corporations embody some special species of civic virtue. Corporate malfeasance in large matters and small ones is hardly uncommon, and when that happens the law has its say. In a liberal democratic order, the rule of law is ubiquitous: Its authority ranges over the whole of society in all its political, social, economic, and cultural aspects. Ubiquitous but bound by the letter of its writ: No less than the people and institutions it governs, the law is subject to limitations, determined in doubtful cases by the process of judicial review.
Progressivism, being activist by nature, has no patience with a rule of law that checks political ambitions. This is the real frustration behind its complaints that corporations are granted rights. Progressivism would prefer its enemy to be proscribed, defenseless, subject to the arbitrary regulations of the administrative state, without legal recourse. This is why progressives seek to transform the judicial branch of American government into a partisan super-legislature that could be relied upon to do their bidding. They’re not so much interested in the rule of law as they are in the rule of lawyers—lawfare, in fact, with corporations high on the agenda.
These reflections may seem to have travelled quite some distance from Joe Biden’s Superbowl Sunday denunciation of Big Snacks. But such petty complaints and regulations—over shrinkflation, over ATM fees, over lemonade stands, over food trucks, over records retention and on and on—symbolize much larger ambitions. A person who believes that there’s a crying need to micromanage tattoo parlors and lemonade stands is unlikely to balk when it comes to dismantling Microsoft or abolishing the internal combustion engine. And perhaps it’s fitting that Superbowl Sunday’s spokesman for the vaulting ambitions of progressivism was a guy who counts the chips in the bag and decries the total as a violation of basic human rights.