So anybody complaining about a "shortage of programmers" is just a cheapskate.
In a free market, what signals to us that more of something should be produced? Buehler? Buehler?
If the prices had been allowed to rise, supply would have equaled demand very quickly, and the shelves would have been stocked as ever. Of course, some people wouldn't have been able to afford them, so we needed some external, non-market mechanism (rationing) to keep prices lower.
While rising prices for the toilet paper would have quickly solved the shortage situation it would have elicited the wrath of local and national authorities. And those authorities can make life hell for anyone trying to charge whatever the market will bear.
Just like there are no circles in the US which are exactly 1.234 meters in diameter. Yes, the concept of a "free market" is an ideal, like the concept of a circle is. That doesn't mean that there aren't instantiations of either one which are closer to the ideal than others.
The market for programmers is one of the freest there is. We don't have guilds limiting how many people can be programmers (like, e.g. the American Medical Association does for doctors.) And we don't have unions forcing arbitrary seniority rules, or uniform pay scales.
And government regulation varies from state to state, but most states are "at will" states--you can either quit or be fired at any time for any reason. You don't have to provide any minimum amount of vacation.
The market in programmers is way more free than, say, the market in automobiles or airplanes, where there are all kinds of regulations about safety, etc. But if you can't afford a Ferrari, or a private jet, that doesn't mean there is a Ferrari shortage, or a private jet shortage.
And if you can't afford to pay market wages for programmers, that doesn't mean there is a shortage of programmers either.
But if the US didn't have implicit price controls ("just try raising prices 3x at this time of national need, you will regret it" from politicians), the deficits would have resolved in a week. My 2c.
I don't know if you've ever been so poor that you couldn't buy toilet paper. But I sure have, and let me tell you, sneaking napkins from starbucks, and getting ink all over your hands from using newspapers goes from being inconvenient to being massively depressing real quick.
What kills me are these "sunshine capitalists" who just loooove the free market when they are making money, but who are the fist to cry "shortages!!!" and complain about the market value of engineering talent when it comes to spending money.
But living in this workers paradise I have seen real people suffer from the lack of medication that was available to anyone in the West. The party leadership did not find it necessary (or easy) to produce it locally, so it was only available to those with the right connections. And so on.
I am now a well-off, spoiled American (and the above reads like an O'Henry? story about two rich gentlemen arguing in a restaurant on who had it harder during their youth), but first impressions linger and I will take capitalism over socialism any day. Yes, capitalism has many failings, but replacing the guidance of money with the wise rule of the elite will always lead to a Venezuela-type mismanagement. My 2c.
If that commodity satisfies a basic need, its unavilability is just even more fucked up.
When I claim a free market has no shortages, I'm using "shortage" in the sense that demand does not exceed supply. "Demand" and "Supply" are also very carefully defined by economists. It's a theorem that under these definitions, in the condition of a free market, there are no shortages.
The market for programmers is certainly not a completely free market, but its close enough that if somebody says they can't find any programmers, it means they are not willing or able to pay market wages for programmers.
I’d go so far as to say that is almost part and parcel what a “liberal” is almost always
When there is a real personal cost, a good chunk of people become surprisingly flexible about their politics, or spectacularly fail to resolve the cognitive dissonance and resort to "My circumstances are different."