Government Cheese and the Rot Beneath the Surface: A Symbol of Failed Interventionism

The Government Cheese Disaster: An Explainer Let’s strip away the dairy jokes and pop culture nostalgia for a moment. The U.S. government hoards over 1.4 billion pounds of cheese in storage facilities—warehouses and underground “cheese caves”—largely thanks to policy decisions made over 40 years ago. If that sentence alone doesn’t make your free-market instincts twitch, you haven’t been paying attention. How Did This Happen? 1. The Dairy Crisis of the 1970s Milk shortages led to rising prices, and in typical Keynesian fashion, the Carter administration decided that the “solution” was to subsidize dairy producers—funneling billions into the industry with the promise to buy up unsold product. 2. Predictable Overproduction With the government guaranteeing purchases, farmers no longer had to worry…