This month, New York Times columnist Ezra Klein slammed “everything-bagel liberalism.” He claimed that progressives often compromise their housing, decarbonization, and technology policy goals by adding laws, mandates, and requirements for other social and economic goals.
The result? They raise expenses and undercut their main purpose of improving output in those areas by utilizing industrial-policy laws to achieve all their goals.
Progressive wish-list elements like child care regulations and equity methods are destroying the semiconductor sector CHIPS Act finance.
Businesses requesting funds must promise not to buy back shares, write “facility workforce plans,” and explain how they will utilize pricey union workers for construction. Delays and higher expenses result.
Progressives’ ignorance about government-led industrial rebirth is alarming.
Conservatives across are furious. American Compass industrial policy advocate Oren Cass says everything-bagel liberalism “co-opts bipartisan action on national priorities for unpopular progressive ends, at which point conservatives will rightly refuse to create any programs at all.” Progressives poison bipartisan industrial policy by utilizing legislation for political objectives.
National conservatism is foolish. Public-choice analysts have warned against state engagement in emerging economic sectors. Pork-barrel politics, presidential power, and legislative language abuse usually follow. Cass and colleagues minimized these worries as libertarians who let the ideal become the enemy of the good, reflexively opposing governmental authority for factory recovery.
This bipartisan backing for industrial policy is starting, and Cass’s objectives are riskier than he thought. First, no “national priority” has lasting bipartisan backing. National conservatives and progressives have different “national priorities.”
National conservatives value pro-manufacturing, Big Tech regulation, and labor union regulations. Progressives? They appreciate part of it, but their early Build Back Better plan’s push for child-care subsidies and child tax credits shows they emphasize a bigger social state.
A worrying naivete about progressives may be seen in the hopes for a government-sparked economic renaissance.
Therefore, it should not come as a surprise that progressives are eager to hijack national conservative policy agendas for their own ends. Cass and industrial-policy proponents like Robert Atkinson of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation seem surprised. Last Thursday, the latter tweeted that most of what we saw was “not industrial policy” but “left-wing green equity industrial policy.” Industrial policy may never be adopted, like collectivism.
Second, normal industrial policy plans usually fail to owe to the dominance of political concerns in the development of laws and distribution of financing. Do our governments consider benefit-cost ratios and select projects with the highest ROI when proposing infrastructure measures? No. The California high-speed rail drama shows that political ties win and party obsessions grow.
The railway, sanctioned in 2008 to connect Los Angeles and San Francisco and projected to be finished by 2020, has been moved to a less efficient route connecting “affordable housing” neighborhoods to offer “needed jobs.” At this pace, the project won’t finish this century. Why are national conservatives surprised that politics-based industrial policy is following suit?
Of course, it’s not simply the legislative process, but in a Congress with tiny majorities and strong polarization, passing anything requires “wins” for varied coalitions. After legislation is passed, vague wording permits administrators and lobbyists to make rules and regulations, which they will. Industrial policy to “create” manufacturing employment gets social-policy adds from Democrats, while Big Tech regulation to avoid “censorship” risks “hate speech” crackdowns by a Federal Trade Commission head like Lina Khan.
National conservatives know this. Last October, economist Bryan Caplan reminded them that Democrats will manage the federal government for half the time and progressive federal employees will run the programs full-time. Add lobbyists and bureaucratic shenanigans, and new government tasks have always been riskier than national conservatives accept.
Hopes for an industrial rebirth that is ignited by the government reveal a worrying naivete about progressives.
Calling progressives disingenuous is a cop-out. Last year, Jason Furman, former head of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, said many progressives don’t understand trade-offs. Minimum wage hikes benefit everyone, decarbonization creates green jobs and minimal carbon emissions, etc. Some government officials believe that child-care standards will reduce semiconductor sector labor shortages, boost output, and help families.
However, if progressives suffer from skewed reasoning, then national conservatives suffer from forgetfulness. They’ve forgotten what conservatives previously knew: that deviating from restricting the state’s role to clear and unmistakable needs gives your opponents the ability to do foolishness.
Cass has argued that public-choice concerns are always present, thus growing government will not worsen them. He now concedes that his industrial strategy would create many progressive requirements, which traditional conservatives hate. In reality, the hopeful picture of a government-driven bipartisan economic rebirth rests on the premise that Democrats will relinquish their goal while an ongoing agreement prevails.
National conservative policy is based on a nonexistent reality. Since Democrats are providing “everything-bagel liberalism,” we must eat industrial policy’s not-so-hidden elements.