Say hello to industrial policy, but never goodbye

Industrial policy in the United States is as old as the country itself. Through the years, virtually every sector of the economy has received some form of government support or protection. Each instance shares important similarities. For one thing, all of them involve complex mechanisms that can be difficult to decipher, cloaking anomalies and distortions like billionaires receiving subsidies from the government. All have proven costly for consumers or taxpayers or in some cases, such as agriculture and automobiles, both. All have succeeded as well in angering US allies. In every occasion, what started out as a means of getting an industry back onto its feet morphed into something no one could have intended at the outset: a kind of permanent corporate welfare plan which benefits a few at the expense of the many.

As the Biden administration takes the United States into the most state-centric set of economic policies since those of Franklin Roosevelt, Senior Research Fellow Keith Rockwell examines the case behind America's policy change and what lessons can be learned from the past. It is worth remembering, Rockwell warns that while market forces are not the be all and end all, neither are governments.