… is from page 5 of Norbert Michel’s excellent 2025 book, Crushing Capitalism: How Populist Policies are Threatening the American Dream (original emphasis):
Industrial policy advocates view the market as a policy device that government officials can manipulate, but in fact, the market is a group of people cooperating to get what they need while offering each other something in exchange. And in the United States, the market is a very large group of people. Even to “redirect” this market would require persuading – or forcing – hundreds of millions of people to so something they would otherwise not do. It’s a core reason that so many experiments with government-directed economies have failed.
DBx Yes.
Note the hubris of those persons who call for industrial policy. Whether, in the U.S., it be Oren Cass on the right or Robert Reich on the left, industrial-policy advocates point to a handful of large, visible features of our vast and intricate economy – an economy dependent upon getting countless unseen details correct – and conclude not only that they, these advocates, know better how these large, visible features should look, but also that their schemes for changing the appearance of these large, visible features will work to improve the welfare of ordinary Americans.
But ask an industrial-policy advocate how he or she came to possess this knowledge. You’ll get lots of criticism (most of it mistaken) of modern economics and of “market fundamentalists.” You’ll be assured (without warrant) that free traders are wedded to a too-narrow and materialistic understanding of humankind. You’ll hear false claims about the current and the past state of the American economy. It’s also likely that you’ll be bazookaed with statistics that are either out of context or simply don’t mean what the pundits who are blasting these statistics at you think they mean.
What you’ll not get is a substantive answer to your question beyond the insistence that this or that sector of the economy is allegedly doing worse than it ‘should’ be doing – with the standard for making this assessment being some (often fabricated or doctored) picture of the past. Yet press on by asking “How can you be sufficiently sure – sufficiently sure, that is, to justify greater government control over the way people spend their incomes – that more manufacturing jobs [or more manufacturing output, or smaller trade deficits, or a smaller financial sector, fill-in-the-blank] will improve the well-being of Americans?” You’ll get no satisfactory answer. You’ll simply be told to put your faith in these divines.
