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As the press regularly remind us, we live in a populist age. Increased bipartisan fury at both government and business has shaken the political parties and scrambled traditional alliances.
It is thus profoundly ironic that our age has seen a rebirth in industrial policy, whereby government provides favors to certain businesses and sectors. On simple logic, there are few things less populist than having the government team up with and provide taxpayer funds to Big Business.
Despite what some in the media say, this new industrial policy has not emerged out of populist demands. It has come from the strained efforts of politicians and intellectuals to justify business handouts using the language of populism, or simply to hide the reality of industrial policy from the public.
The Biden administration provided a master class in dressing up industrial policy and favors to companies in populist rhetoric. When then-President Joe Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022, he claimed that “the American people won and the special interests lost.” In reality, more than half of the almost $400 billion in original estimated environmental spending
Continue reading the entire piece at the Washington Examiner (paywall)
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Judge Glock is the director of research and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor at City Journal.