We do love the smell of a free market in the morning

That this particular example comes from restrictions upon the freedom of entry into the market doesn’t change the underlying lesson - markets work:

Pay for HGV drivers jumped by more than a tenth in just five months as the industry struggles with severe worker shortages that are straining Britain’s supply chains.

The “staggering” rise from February to July, shown in figures from jobs site Indeed, is almost double the rate of increase across all driving jobs. The increase is more than 13 times the 0.8pc average rise across all jobs during the period.

Supply has changed, so prices have.

As to why supply has changed there are different arguments put forward. Test centres being closed because of the lockdowns has meant no new entrants on the supply side. However, when we look at what the industry is blaming it upon it seems Brexit is the issue. Some large portion of drivers were EU nationals who no longer have the right to work in the UK economy. As we pointed out elsewhere:

Brexit is about to give us a problem with this, though. Karl Marx was right: wages won’t rise when there’s spare labour available, his “reserve army” of the unemployed. The capitalist doesn’t have to increase pay to gain more workers if there’s a squad of the starving eager to labour for a crust. But if there are no unemployed, labour must be tempted away from other employers, and one’s own workers have to be pampered so they do not leave. When capitalists compete for the labour they profit from, wages rise.

Britain’s reserve army of workers now resides in Wroclaw, Vilnius, Brno, the cities of eastern Europe. The Polish plumbers of lore did flood in and when the work dried up they ebbed away again. The net effect of Brexit will be that British wages rise as the labour force shrinks and employers have to compete for the sweat of hand and brow.

It’s entirely true that the standard economic assumption is that immigration doesn’t lower local wages. Because those immigrants bring with them their own demands as well as the supply of their labour. This might need a little modification to point out that this is only true of settled labour, not transient.

Our major point here though is that one that markets do in fact work. Circumstances have changed therefore prices have and in doing so the price changes have adapted the whole to the changed circumstances. Higher pay will call forth more supply of drivers at which point we’re done and dusted, right?

This lesson being true whatever we think of either Brexit or the free movement of labour. Even if we think that one or both is a gross mistake prices still allow the economy to adapt to even calamitous errors.

Pretty good system, eh?