Some conservatives are passing around George Will's blast at the Carrier deal...
Responding to political threats larded with the money of other people, Carrier has somewhat modified its planned transfers of some manufacturing to Mexico. This represents the dawn of bipartisanship: The Republican Party now shares one of progressivism’s defining aspirations — government industrial policy, with the political class picking winners and losers within, and between, economic sectors. This always involves the essence of socialism — capital allocation, whereby government overrides market signals about the efficient allocation of scarce resources
I'm not entirely unsympathetic to Will's argument and yet it's hard not to see how much he sounds like a Soviet apparatchik or leftist responding to major changes by reciting technical dogma.
Market signals. Efficient allocation of resources. Socialism. It's all there. And yet it's a bunch of dogma that fails to address what's actually going on. This is something that the left is usually guilty of. But it's a habit that anyone who views the world through an ideological lens can fall into.
There is no attempt to actually deal with reality on its own terms. There is just the heresy of violating the free market with the resulting consequences, etc. Everything is known and understood. It's up to us to follow the good free market path or be damned with a decaying economy. But the trouble is that applying free market dogma to a global marketplace where most countries are playing by very different rules has decimated much of the working class. Bipartisanship in the past has meant both Democrats and Republicans telling the working class that the jobs aren't coming back and that they ought to adapt by going to college. And that meanwhile we need talented immigrants to help us compete. This is how we ended up where we are with a major class and ideological divide. And with Trump.
Government intervention in the marketplace is indeed corrupting. Both ways. But the role of government is also to set policy when it comes to our interactions with the rest of the world.
And, frankly, the free markets first dogma that Will articulates is not a magical formula. It's a set of beliefs that also have to be supported by a political system. And that requires a country whose people are willing to back it because they see benefits from it. It's true that we don't have a proper free market and we ought to deregulate on a major scale. But Will ought to consider why support for it is so weak.