Economics

Bureaucracy, Labor, & Tariffs: How Government Is Making BLTs More Expensive

The BLT—a delicious celebration of the power of markets—exemplifies political attacks on the free movement of goods and people.

Eric Boehm | From the August/September 2026 issue

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(Illustration: Galich Ws/Fiverr)

Life might be like a box of chocolates, but the economy? It's more like a sandwich.

Whether we're talking about a club, a Reuben, or a hoagie, every sandwich is the result of supply chains that stretch across the country and around the world. Final assembly takes place at the deli counter—or in your kitchen, if you prefer the DIY version—but those layers of meat, bread, and veggies depend on hundreds of people working to sow, irrigate, feed, reap, slaughter, knead, package, and ship. Economist Leonard Read famously observed that no one on Earth is capable of single-handedly making a pencil. A sandwich might be slightly less complex (no mining involved), but it would still take untold hours of labor on a fairly large farm to put one together entirely from scratch.

And when it comes to sandwiches, there is none better than the BLT. You may disagree, but you'd be wrong.

There are more complex sandwiches, more ornate sandwiches, and certainly sandwiches that wind together more expansive supply chains. But as with a great cocktail, the key to the BLT's perfection is its simplicity and structure. Every bite is a whole greater than the sum of its rather mundane parts—the salty, smoky bacon bouncing off the tomato's sweet acidity, and the crunch of the lettuce resonating between a pair of perfectly toasted slices of bread.

James Beard, the 20th century American chef so revered that the country's top culinary award is now named after him, once said that the key to a good sandwich is a "divine mix of flavors and textures." He was talking about the BLT's upscale cousin, the chicken club, but the point stands.

Not merely a culinary wonder, a BLT is a remarkably condensed product of specialization: industrial pork production, modern farming technology, refrigeration, and logistics. Hundreds of people in many fields—including some in literal fieldsin Mexico and Arizona—helped to put that sandwich on your plate. Every bite of a BLT is a delicious celebration of the power of markets to fill our lives with everyday wonders.

The BLT is also, I regret to inform you, under attack.

No politician or bureaucrat has openly declared war on the BLT, of course. There is no Starbucks cup or Bud Light ad to feign outrage over. There is no moral panic surrounding crispy bacon, no partisan lines dividing the tomato from the lettuce. For that we can be thankful.

Instead, the BLT has become collateral damage in a series of other policy maneuvers. From well-intentioned animal welfare efforts to nakedly protectionist tariffs, from immigration restrictions to industrial policy, governments are clamping down on the free movement of goods and people that produce the bounties of capitalism, as exemplified by the BLT.

My favorite sandwich is not the only or greatest victim of those efforts. Nevertheless, this perfect pile of delicatessen delight has a story to tell.

Bacon

As he was campaigning for a return to the White House, President Donald Trump briefly zeroed in on the rising price of bacon to illustrate what was wrong with Democratic Party governance.

"When you look at the costs of groceries, the cost of bacon, where it went up four and five times," Trump said in Asheville, North Carolina, in August 2024, "I don't order bacon anymore. It's too expensive."

It's hard to believe that anything might be too expensive for Trump's well-known tastes, but the man did have a point. During the Biden administration, inflation was hot, but the price of bacon was sizzling. An average pound of bacon cost $5.83 in January 2021, according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), before rising to a peak of $7.60 per pound in October 2022—a 30 percent increase.

Obviously, you can't have a BLT without bacon. It's the savory showman. The lead guitar. The whole reason we're here—even if any real sandwich connoisseur knows that the tomato is the key to the combination—is that bacon is delicious. You don't have to feel guilty about it. Evolution wired our brains to crave protein and salt. Piles of money have been spent on engineering that slice of pork so it crisps up in just the right way. We never had a chance.

The average American eats 18 pounds of bacon every year. That's roughly the weight of a car tire. At the current average price of $6.82 per pound, that's about $122 for a year's supply. Still a great deal, in terms of pure masticatory bliss, but less amazing than it used to be.

The major factor in the rising price of bacon is the rising cost of raising pigs. And the main culprit in pigflation is a new rule adopted by voters in California, even though the state only produces a scant 0.1 percent of the country's hogs.

In 2018, Californians approved Proposition 12 by a wide margin, thus updating an existing animal welfare law to require more space for chickens, calves, and hogs. Farms worldwide that do not meet the new requirements cannot sell their meat in California, and the law allows state regulators to inspect facilities outside California's borders to ensure compliance. Largely, that means eyeing Iowa, which supplies more than one-third of America's pork.

The law raises complicated ethical and federalist questions. How much space should be afforded to an animal being raised so that it can be slaughtered? Any answer,........

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