Repeating outdated tropes ad nauseum is dumb.

There is bipartisan support for industrial policy.

2008 shaped our thinking on this and most of our policymakers in the 19th century were influence by Alexander Hamilton and Fredrich List.

Our allies (Japan, South Korea) as well as our competitors (China) use this as well, and so did the US until the 1990s.

I support the CHIPS Act and IRA. I also support building an American SWF as well as operationalizing state-managed SWFs and pension funds into SDFs as well. And so do most decisionmakers who were in the Obama and Biden admins as well as the Trump admin.

Edit: can't reply

> so I'm not sure we should shape all of our policy

What I mean is pre-2008 it was heterodox to assume that government capital could be deployed to build or rebuild industries.

The default assumption was industrial policy only succeeded once (Japan).

The mixture of public-private subsidizes at the state level to develop GreenTech clusters in TX and CA, Semiconductor clusters in AZ, NatGas and Oil production in the Dakotas, and other such "booms" in the 2010s compared to Germany's hard stance on austerity leading to deindustrialization and China catching up to Germany in a number of core industrial technologies influenced the newish generation of policymakers.

> For this specific industrial policy

Yes [0][1][2][3].

[0] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-09-06/biden-aid...

[1] - https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/10/us/politics/us-sovereign-...

[2] - https://www.yalejournal.org/publications/wealth-and-diplomac...

[3] - https://irs.princeton.edu/industrial-policy-united-states

> I support the CHIPS Act and IRA

So do I. As I understand it, those bills involved incentives that any company could access provided that they met the conditions (manufacture in US, etc). The IRA also provided direct incentives to consumers to spend their money as they saw fit (EVs, solar, heat pumps, etc).

Direct investment by the executive branch is something else entirely. For example, Intel is now blessed and too big to fail. Why would anyone start a competitor to it? If you did start a competitor, your first call would be to Commerce, right? Seems like a heaping dose of moral hazard.

I can understand direct investment in very narrow circumstances, such as rare earth minerals and possibly something like nuclear power generation.

An alternative is a truly-independent sovereign wealth fund, or independently-governed pension investment arm such as the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board. But I doubt, in light of the Humphrey's Executor decision, that it's possible for the United States to create such an entity now.

> 2008 shaped our thinking on this

I've seen this assertion a few times now in the thread here, can you elaborate? The events of 2008 were kind of extraordinary, so I'm not sure we should shape all of our policy based on that - except in terms of trying to avoid another 2008/Great Recession, but I don't see these actions doing that.

> There is bipartisan support for industrial policy.

For this specific industrial policy? The Intel deal was an outright shakedown.

There's bipartisan support for healthcare, too. Unfortunately, quite a bit of serious dissension on exactly what that means.

edit: Yes [0][1][2][3].

So, no. Not the "pick random companies and extort shares out of them" approach.