The evolution of conservative thinking in recent years could hardly be described more concisely than in the title of a recent opinion piece: “Why I believe in a well-conducted industrial policy.” This is what Senator Marco Rubio expressed for the Washington Post and, at greater length, for National Affairs.
Note that I am not addressing conservatives heart. Calling out legally convicted violent criminals like the January 6 rioters »hostages» further testifies to the sad and profound changes of mind of a large part of the right.
What I’m referring to instead are the ideas, arguments, and principles that once defined conservatism intellectually, among them the rejection of the kind of government intervention in the economy that the Florida Republican now seems to favor.
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Modern conservatism – that associated with Barry Goldwater, William F. Buckley, George Will, Thomas Sowell, Ronald Reagan and, to some extent, Rubio when he arrived in Washington – once considered central economic planning and everything associated with it, including “industrial policy,” to be dangerous folly. Buckley, 1955 mission statement for National Review said: “Perhaps the most important and easily demonstrable lesson of history is that liberty goes hand in hand with a state of political decentralization, that government at a distance is government unaccountable.” ” He also noted that “the competitive pricing system is indispensable to freedom and material progress.”
This belief dates back to Edmund Burke and Adam Smith, but it became a defining principle of the American right during the Cold War, against the backdrop of the rise of the Soviet Union as well as the New Deal and New Deal domestic programs of Franklin Roosevelt. Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society.
The conservative argument against state efforts to shape the economy has many elements. One of these is the “problem of knowledge,” a phrase adapted from Nobel laureate economist Friedrich Hayek’s brilliant 1945 essay, “The Use of Knowledge in Society.”
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Simply put, the problem with knowledge is that society, including the market, is too complex and too dynamic for government experts to reliably and remotely direct it. In a free market, prices capture information that even the best data collectors cannot obtain. The closer you are to the problem, the closer you are to the solution.
Public choice theory — what another Nobel Prize-winning economist, James M. Buchanan, called “politics without romance” – adds another layer of reasons to distrust central planning. Government experts and regulators are often “captured” by the industries or activists most affected by their policies. Furthermore, once politicians get involved, policy priorities multiply – going as far as boosting employment, expanding diversity, favoring certain states or districts, protecting specific industries, and so on. – and the government’s stated objectives become pretexts for other motivations. “Crises” – pandemics, wars, unemployment, environmental problems – become pretexts for rewarding favored groups.
Take for example President Biden’s recent announcement that he would rebuild the collapsed Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, both “as quickly as humanly possible” and “with union labor and American steel.” . Well, what is it: quickly or with these restrictions?
This brings us to Rubio. Take it from a longtime columnist, you can’t always blame writers for the headlines that mischievous editors put on our stories. But “Why I Believe in Industrial Policy – Done Well” perfectly illustrates the senator’s argument and the problems with the right’s broader infatuation with central planning.
Oh, you want to do it RIGHT? Well, that changes everything!
I mean, if only someone had told Hayek and Buchanan that their objections could be answered simply by “doing things right.”
The conservative mindset shift goes beyond industrial policy. It’s really about the use of state power in general. Too many Republicans no longer have a problem – moral or otherwise – with government imposing its will on society, as long as “good” people do it “right.” The problem of knowledge, they seem to believe, is limited to the left.
This is the main conceptual failure of Rubio’s argument, but there are others.
We used to say that the left invented crises and twisted the facts to justify government expansion. The same can now be said of the right. Rubio suggests that until very recently, America embraced “unfettered free trade.” This is not only false, but, as Reason’s Eric Boehm says, suggesteda particularly strange claim from a prominent advocate of Florida sugar subsidies.
Rubio also states that America’s manufacturing industry has suffered “from decades of neglect” and that “the collapse of America’s manufacturing industry has… caused incalculable harm to the social fabric of our country.” What collapse? While it is true that industrial employment in the United States has been declining – primarily due to automation, not trade – industrial production has been increasing for a century.
I agree with Rubio that we should spend more on defense for national security purposes. But Rubio wants the spending to also help repair the country’s social fabric and serve as a jobs program.
I don’t share the senator’s confidence that Washington could accomplish all this if only people like him were in charge.
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This story was originally published in the Los Angeles Times.
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