People have very short memories with the car shortage and the gasoline shortage. If we look at this from an Adam Smith market perspective rather than a Karl Marx political perspective, we see (and I might be wrong with some of the dates, and am open to correction) -
1) Everything normal in 2019 - except for the deep freeze in Texas (2019, right? not 2018?) which destroys at least one major semiconductor plant. It will take around five months for the plant to come back to productivity, and about that time, if not longer, for the shortages to actually reach the factories, because the semiconductors are parts of other products, not directly used by automakers.
2) COVID strikes late in 2019, but doesn't have a huge impact in North America.
3) COVID starts becoming a big deal around March 2020 in the United States after already shutting down sections of China. Scientists have not had time to figure out how it's transmitted. Hospitals become overloaded with emergency patients and can't take in ordinary emergencies - no beds, no doctors. Ventilators, normally not used much, suddenly go into hot demand. Based on early reports it is believed the chances of death if infected are 4% (it later turns out to have been 2% which is still high).
4) Because the places where COVID strikes first are quickly overwhelmed, resulting in photos of trucks full of dead bodies and such, lockdown starts. Car buying falls to just about nothing. Travel plummets even before states lock their borders.
5) With nobody traveling, gasoline is not desired - but gasoline quickly goes bad, so stations start a reverse price war where they mark down fuel to get it out of their tanks before it becomes useless and has to be removed and destroyed. Oil wells cannot be shut down quickly so they keep pumping to a market that quickly runs out of storage places, and oil briefly goes below $0 per barrel. Contrary to some opinions, this was not good or healthy. Shale oil companies start dying or being swallowed by larger fish because they only make money when oil is over $60 per barrel, due to the cost of cleaning up the oil.
6) Lockdowns become global, not just for New York and New Jersey—by global literally meaning around the world, including the country that manufactures 30% of everything, China. Even without lockdowns, the loss of key people has an impact and labor shortages begin—not only because people don't want to expose themselves to COVID, but because people are dying. (If we ignore how deaths are labeled and look at excess deaths, which is probably the most accurate measure, we see nearly half a million deaths in the US alone—just in 2020).
https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid?country=IND~USA~GBR~CAN~DEU~FRA
7) Refineries and oil production adapt to much lower fuel use
8) Lockdowns end and people work around COVID. Locked in Americans start ordering massive amounts of crap from Amazon and driving for fun. Suddenly demand for Chinese crap and for fuel spike, and the ports become clogged because they are seeing more than double the usual amount of traffic. Truckers become in-demand to the point that signing bonuses almost become serious and not Lucy-footballs. Americans start whining about the government not being good at port management but keep giving Amazon a record year. More to the point, gasoline prices start shooting up because production takes a long time to increase and people want fuel
now.
8a) Demand for cars goes from just about zero to more than normal. However, automakers use chips which aren't available because of all the lockdowns and COVID-related plant shutdowns and also natural disasters which occurred in higher than usual quantities over the last two years. Car dealers laugh all the way to the bank as they are able to lay off salesmen, pay nothing in floorplan loans, and make ten times the profit on each car.
9) Russia does not declare war on Ukraine but invades anyway, disrupting supplies of key gases (particularly neon) and wiring harnesses used in cars. Some fuel deliveries are delayed. Oil prices go up again and people again blame politicians instead of the market. People start whining about nonexistent or obsolete executive orders that had no impact on oil availability, and the closure of a pipeline that hadn't been built and would mainly have been used to export Canadian oil that most American refineries can't use anyway.
I don't know why people ignore the “invisible hand of the market,” but you really don't need politicians for any of this.
