The change in conservative spirit in recent years could hardly be expressed more succinctly than in the headline of a recent op-ed: Why I Believe in Well-Delivered Industrial Policy. That’s what Senator Marco Rubio of the Washington Post and, more extensively, of National Affairs thought.

Note that I’m not talking about the conservatives

heart

. Holding lawfully convicted violent criminals hostage, like the January 6 rioters, speaks more to the sad and profound changes at the heart of much of the right.

Rather, what I’m referring to are the ideas, arguments, and principles that once intellectually defined conservatism, including the rejection of the kind of government intervention in the economy that the Florida Republican now apparently favors.

Modern conservatism, as associated with Barry Goldwater, William F. Buckley, George Will, Thomas Sowell, Ronald Reagan, and to some extent Rubio, when he arrived in Washington, once considered central economic planning and everything related to it, including industrial policy, as dangerous folly. Buckley’s 1955 mission statement for National Review read: Perhaps the most important and easily demonstrated lesson of history is that freedom goes hand in hand with a state of political decentralization, that a government at a distance is an irresponsible government. He also noted that the competitive price system is indispensable to freedom and material progress.

This belief can be traced back to Edmund Burke and Adam Smith, but became a defining principle for the American right during the Cold War, against the backdrop of the rise of the Soviet Union and the domestic programs of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and World War II . Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society.

The conservative argument against state efforts to shape the economy has many facets. One of these is the knowledge problem, a phrase taken from Nobel Prize-winning economist Friedrich Hayek’s brilliant 1945 essay The Use of Knowledge in Society.

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

Public choice theory, which another Nobel laureate, 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. And once politicians get involved, policy priorities multiply and extend to boosting employment, increasing diversity, favoring certain states or districts, protecting specific industries and so on, and set goals become pretexts for other motives. Crises, pandemics, war, unemployment and environmental problems become excuses to reward privileged constituencies.

Take President Biden’s recent announcement that he would rebuild the collapsed Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore as quickly as humanly possible, and with union labor and American steel. Well, what is it fast or with those limitations?

Which brings us to Rubio. Take it from a former columnist: You can’t always blame writers for the naughty headlines that naughty editors put in our articles. But Why I Believe in a Well-Delivered Industrial Policy perfectly captures the senator’s argument and the problems with the broader right-wing craze 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 conservative minds goes beyond industrial policy. It’s really about the use of state power in general. Too many Republicans no longer have a problem, morally or otherwise, with government imposing its will on society, as long as the right people do it right. The knowledge problem, they seem to believe, is limited to the left wing.

This is the core of the conceptual failure of Rubio’s argument, but there are others.

We used to say that the left fabricated crises and distorted facts to justify expanding government. The same can now be said of the right. Rubio suggests that America embraced unfettered free trade until recently. This is not only untrue but, as Reason’s Eric Boehm suggested, a particularly strange claim from a leading defender of Florida’s sugar subsidies.

Rubio also argues that American industry has suffered decades of neglect and that the collapse of American industry has caused incalculable damage to the social fabric of our country. What collapse? While it is true that industrial employment in the US has declined largely due to automation, industrial production has not increased in a century.

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

I don’t share the senators’ confidence that Washington could accomplish all that if only people like him were in charge.

@JonaDispatch