GOLDBERG: Republicans are abandoning even deeply held principles

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The shift in conservative thinking in recent years can hardly be better described than the title of a recent article: “Why I Believe in Industrial Policy – Done Right.” Senator Marco Rubio expressed his opinion in this way The Washington Post and more broadly, for National affairs.

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Note that I am not referring to a conservative change of heart. Calling legally convicted violent criminals like the January 6 rioters “hostages” speaks volumes about the sad and profound shift in much of the right.

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I'm talking about 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 supports.

Modern Conservatism – Barry Goldwater, William F. The sort associated with Buckley, George Will, Thomas Sowell, Ronald Reagan, and to some extent Rubio when he first came to Washington—once considered central economic planning and everything related to it, including “industrial policy.” ,” to be dangerously stupid.

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Buckley's 1955 mission statement National Review declared, “Perhaps the most important and easily demonstrable lesson of history is that liberty goes hand in hand with political decentralization, that remote government is irresponsible government.” He also noted that “a competitive price system is necessary for freedom and material progress.”

This belief can be traced back to Edmund Burke and Adam Smith, but it became a defining principle of American law during the Cold War under the rise of the Soviet Union and under Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal and New Deal agendas. Lyndon Johnson's Great Society.

There are many strands to the conservative argument against state efforts to shape the economy. One of these is the “knowledge problem,” adapted from Nobel Prize-winning economist Friedrich Hayek's brilliant 1945 essay, “The Uses of Knowledge in Society.”

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The problem of education, simply put, is that society, including the market, is too complex and too dynamic for government experts to reliably guide it from afar. In a free market, prices capture information that even the best data collectors cannot. The closer you are to the problem, the closer you are to the solution.

Social choice theory — Nobel Prize laureate economist James M. What Buchanan called “unromantic politics” adds another layer of distrust to central planning. Government experts and regulators are often “captured” by industries or activists affected by their policies. Also, once policymakers get involved, policy priorities increase—increasing employment, expanding diversity, favoring certain states and districts, protecting specific industries, and so on. – and the government's stated goals are excuses for other reasons. “Crisis” – pandemic, war, unemployment, environmental problems – will be an excuse to reward the selected constituencies.

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Take President Joe Biden's recent announcement that he will rebuild Baltimore's collapsed Francis Scott Key Bridge with “human power” and “unions and American steel.” And which one is it?

Which brings us to Rubio. Take it from a long-time columnist, you can't always blame the writers for the headlines put on our articles by rogue editors. But Why I Believe in Industrial Policy – Done Right perfectly illustrates the senator's argument and the wider right-wing vogue issue of central planning.

Oh, you want to do it right? This changes everything!

The shift in conservative thinking goes beyond industrial policy. It is about the use of public power in general. Too many Republicans have no problem with the government imposing its will on society as long as the “right” people are doing it “right”. The problem of education, they seem to believe, is confined to the left wing.

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This is the main conceptual failure of Rubio's argument, but there are others.

We leftists have invented crises and misrepresented facts to justify the expansion of power. Right now we can talk about the right. Rubio suggests that America has until recently embraced “unfettered free trade.” That's not true, and it's a particularly surprising statement from Florida's leading advocate of sugar subsidies, as presented by Reason Eric Boehm.

Rubio also says that American manufacturing has been “neglected for decades” and that “the decline of American manufacturing … has done incalculable damage to the social fabric of our country.” What kind of decline? While it is true that US industrial employment has declined, industrial output has been growing for a century.

I agree with Rubio that we need to spend more on defense for national security purposes. But Rubio wants such spending to rebuild the nation's social fabric and serve as a jobs program.

I don't share the senator's belief that Washington can do that if it's run by people like himself.

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