Commodification of essential goods

Explain 2 ways in which the commodification of essential goods has caused a crisis during the Covid-19 pandemic. Be sure to reference the Kuttner reading in explaining your response.

Robert Kuttner Everything for Sale Robert Kuttner is cofounder and coeditor of all but dropped from the collective memory.

Gov- The American Prospect. ernment stands impeached and impoverished, along with democratic politics itself. Unfettered markets are deemed both the essence of human liberty, and the most expedient route to prosperity.

In the United States, the alternative to laissez- The ideal of a free, self-regulating market is newly faire has never been socialism. Rather, the interven- triumphant.

The historical lessons of market excess, tionist party, from Hamilton and Lincoln, through from the Gilded Age to the Great Depression, have the Progressive era, Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon From Robert Kuttner, Everything for Sale: The Virtues and Limits of Markets (New York: Knopf, 1998).