The latest sign that Republicans are abandoning even their most deeply held principles
Op-Ed
Jonah Goldberg April 9, 2024
The changing of the conservative mind in recent years could hardly be captured more pithily than in the headline of a recent op-ed: Why I believe in industrial policy done right. So opined Sen. Marco Rubio for the Washington Post and, at greater length, for National Affairs.
Note that Im not addressing the conservative
heart
. Calling lawfully convicted violent criminals such as the Jan. 6 rioters hostages speaks more to the sad and profound changes of heart on much of the right.
What Im referring to, rather, are the ideas, arguments and principles that once defined conservatism intellectually, among them rejection of the kind of government intervention in the economy that the Florida Republican now apparently favors.
Modern conservatism the sort associated with Barry Goldwater, William F. Buckley, George Will, Thomas Sowell, Ronald Reagan and to some extent Rubio when he arrived in Washington once regarded central economic planning and everything associated with it, including industrial policy, to be dangerous folly. Buckleys 1955 mission statement for National Review declared: Perhaps the most important and readily demonstrable lesson of history is that freedom goes hand in hand with a state of political decentralization, that remote government is irresponsible government. He also noted that the competitive price system is indispensable to liberty and material progress.
This conviction can be traced back to Edmund Burke and Adam Smith, but it became a defining principle on the American right during the Cold War, against the backdrop of the rise of the Soviet Union as well as the domestic programs of Franklin Roosevelts New Deal and Lyndon Johnsons Great Society.
There are many strands to the conservative argument against state efforts to shape the economy. One is the knowledge problem, a phrase adapted from Nobel Prize-winning economist Friedrich Hayeks brilliant 1945 essay The Use of Knowledge in Society.
The knowledge problem, simply put, is that society, including the market, is too complex and too dynamic for government experts to reliably direct it from afar. In a free market, prices capture information that even the best data-gatherers cant. The closer you are to the problem, the closer you are to the solution.
Public choice theory what another Nobel laureate 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. Also, once politicians get involved, policy priorities multiply extending to boosting employment, expanding diversity, favoring certain states or districts, protecting specific industries and so on and the governments stated goals become pretexts for other motives. Crises pandemics, war, unemployment, environmental problems become excuses to reward favored constituencies.
Take President Bidens recent announcement that he would rebuild Baltimores collapsed Francis Scott Key Bridge both as rapidly as humanly possible and with union labor and American steel. Well, which is it rapidly or with those restrictions?
That brings us to Rubio. Take it from a longtime columnist, you cant always blame writers for the headlines mischievous editors put on our articles. But Why I believe in industrial policy done right perfectly captures the senators argument and the trouble with the broader right-wing fad for 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 by just doing it right.
The change in the conservative mind goes beyond industrial policy. It’s really about the use of state power generally. Too many Republicans no longer have any problem moral or otherwise with government imposing its will on society, so long as the right people are doing it right. The knowledge problem, they seem to believe, is confined to the left wing.
This is the core conceptual failing of Rubios argument, but there are others.
We used to say the left invented crises and distorted facts to justify expanding government. The same can now be said of the right. Rubio suggests that until very recently, America embraced unfettered free trade. This is not only untrue but, as Reasons Eric Boehm suggested, a particularly strange assertion by a leading defender of Florida sugar subsidies.
Rubio also states that American manufacturing has suffered decades of neglect and that the collapse of American manufacturing has done incalculable harm to our nation’s social fabric. What collapse? While its true that U.S. industrial employment has declined mostly thanks to automation, not trade industrial output has been increasing for a century.
I agree with Rubio that we should spend more on defense for national security purposes. But Rubio wants such spending to also mend the nations social fabric and serve as a jobs program.
I dont share the senators confidence that Washington could accomplish all that if only people like him were in charge.
