We've all had a good chortle about Kentucky Fried Chicken's problems over their new distribution contract with DHL. Stores closing because of a lack of fresh chicken, musings over who knew they used that ingredient, those sorts of things.
What is going to get missed here is how this shows the superiority of a market economy:
KFC has gone back to its original recipe for chicken deliveries by rehiring Bidvest Logistics in the wake of last month’s supply fiasco.
The American fast food chain was forced to temporarily close hundreds of storesafter it ran out of chicken following the botched handover of its logistics contract to DHL and QSL. “To put it simply,” KFC tweeted at the time, “we’ve got the chicken, we’ve got the restaurants, but we’ve just had issues getting them together.”
We can just hear the Teenage Trots giggling in their bedrooms, can't we? The State, planning, that would have done something as simple as getting chicken to the restaurants, wouldn't it? This will be used as an example of the inefficiencies of private economic action, undirected by said state.
In response we might point out that several of us have lived and worked in places with state distribution of food and believe us, it isn't better than this at all.
However, the real point here is not that a mistake was made. We're humans, any economic system is going to contain humans and therefore we're going to have errors. Given, you know, that erring and humanity bit. What matters is how we clean up errors.
That contract changed on Feb 14, here we are on 10 March, the contract was reassigned on 8 March. That is, 3 weeks after the error started it has been solved.
Now think of any government error which has even been admitted in such a time period let alone solved.
Sure, any system of economic organisation will contain errors. The difference between government planning and market chaos is who cleans up the mistakes, solves the problems, faster? That would be the markets, precisely why they are so desirable - over and on top of all that freedom and liberty stuff.