A Cynic Like Me Would Argue That the US Has Always Had a National Industrial Policy

Joe Biden has been suggesting that the US should explicitly promote a national industry policy.

It's just that this policy favored less productive rent-seeking industries whose campaign donations were valued, and not industries that improved the general welfare.

When one looks at the companies favored by government subsidies, both direct and indirect, we find, finance, insurance, real estate, software, media, and weapons manufacture.

With the exception of the arms industry, most of these industries have been favored through indirect subsidies, and these subsidies have been expanded over the past few decades.

Software, media, and pharma have had their subsidies increased through extensions to copyright, exclusivity periods, and (for pharma in particular) evergreening.

Additionally, the multinational "free trade" agreement have exported these changes world wide.

Furthermore these same deals have served to extend the reach of the finance and insurance industries, all while instruments like the the Investor State Dispute Settlement process serve to enhance their ability to evade local regulations.

And real-estate has been subsidized by aggressive tax benefits as well as a policy of salutary neglect towards the centrality of its role in money laundering.  (The latter applies to finance as well)

The U.S. and its allies have long pressed China to stop helping favored industries with subsidies, government preferences and other interventions.

Now they are beginning to copy it. Last month, the U.S. Senate voted for direct industry subsidies with little precedent: $52 billion for new semiconductor fabrication plants, called “fabs.”

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Collectively, this represents an embrace of “industrial policy,” the idea that governments should direct resources to industries critical to the national interest rather than leaving things to the market.

I would argue that implementing anexplicitly stated industrial policy is at least as much a fight against corruption in our polity as it is just the picking choosing the sectors which would champion the US economy.

I further believe that this would be a good thing, as unspoken assumptions always seem to benefit parasites.