👻 Truck or Treat! 🎃 A “Labor Shortage” Vanishes Into Thin Air

Commonplace ^ | Oct 31, 2025 | Oren Cass and Daniel Kishi

[E. Pluribus Unum]

Positive results continue to emerge from the Trump administration’s ongoing experiment in tightening the labor market for truck drivers. As we highlighted last week, trucking spot rates are rising for legal American drivers. Now, in an especially stunning turn of events (and an entertaining one, for industry watchers), the American Trucking Association is admitting that, actually, there never was a labor shortage. “What we have in the United States is a quality problem around drivers, much more so than an absolute number,” says one official. “There’s never been a lack of people with [licenses]... what we lack is the number of qualified drivers who meet our high standards of professionalism and safety,” says another. You know what might help with that? Hiring and retaining qualified drivers.

As Gord Magill explained last year in an American Compass essay, “Crash and Churn”: “There is, in fact, an oversupply of truck drivers in the United States. The problem for trucking companies is retaining drivers, but doing something about this problem costs them more than ignoring it and using government funds to paper it over.” Time to let the market rip!

This week brought a number of exciting technological developments, about which Oren would like to have a word:

Many opponents of reindustrialization don’t even consider the goal to be a valuable one. “Exports are the unfortunate thing we do just so we can get those desirable imports,” said Jason Furman, chair of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, at the World Trade Organization’s Public Forum in Geneva last year. “We should not want to be” a manufacturing center again, according to Michael Strain, director of economic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute.

But then comes the claim that the horse has already...

[kiryandil]

IABTFD - In After Bookshelf The Freeploading Deadbeat

[Lizavetta]

what we lack is the number of qualified drivers who meet our high standards of professionalism and safety,”

Like hiring iliterate illegals who can't read our road signs and don't have training?

[If You Want It Fixed - Fix It]

Same for mechanics.

Shut down the scammers and honest good 9nes can charge more and everybody gets it fixed right the first time, saving money, feeding mechanics’ families!!!

Win win win