In terms of economic policy, 2020 is shaping up to be the battle of the protectionists

On our Barney & Clyde podcast, Clyde Myers and I frequently do a segment we call "Maybe Someday We'll Try A Free Market." We like the slightly wistful tone of the title, and the hint of cynicism, the suggestion that it's a when-donkeys-fly grade of speculation.

Which is not to say that hope is entirely extinguished in our liberty-cherishing hearts. We press on with making the case for it, even in times like these, when, as Kevin Williamson points out, the only viable alternatives for post-Americans to choose from regarding federal policy are erratic protectionism and leftist protectionism:

A promise of economic nationalism, an expensive infrastructure bill that’s really a make-work program, prejudice against foreigners, denunciations of Wall Street — Joe Biden is running the 2016 Trump campaign against Donald Trump in 2020.

Joe Biden gave a big economic speech in Pennsylvania yesterday, and his economic agenda has three parts: 1) a $400 billion federal spending spree with some additional “Buy American” rules attached to it; 2) a somewhat more modest ($300 billion) raft of subsidies for politically connected industries (electric vehicles, telecoms) that we are going to pretend is a research-and-development program; 3) a very large tax increase (by some estimates, the largest proposed in modern times) to pay for No. 1 and No. 2. You will recognize this as approximately the same bulls—t that Donald Trump was peddling in 2016 and Barack Obama was peddling in 2008 and 2012. It is the same crap that has at various times been peddled by figures such as George Wallace, Ross Perot, and Pat Buchanan, and by relatively minor figures such as Ted Strickland.  It is nonsense, but it never goes out of fashion.

It would be interesting to know what kinds of discussions among Biden's advisors led to putting such throbbing insularity forward at this time. Maybe they concluded that glitches in mask and ventilator availability at the onset of the pandemic had post-America sufficiently spooked to be clamoring for supply chains to be pulled within the confines of our continental shores.

In any event, there's now going to be a period of each campaign going to great lengths to distinguish its flavor of protectionism from the other. And there are distinctions. The Trump flavor focuses on tariffs and upending existing trade agreements. The Biden flavor focuses on taxes and subsidies.

Still, they have in common the assumption that human ingenuity could never improve human lives as well as government.

Joseph Schumpeter, call your office.

The economic life of our species is distinct from the governments we have gathered ourselves under. Organizations engaged in making and selling products - by which I pretty much mean those structured as corporations - have needs for particular materials, processes and people that change over time and at any given moment are most profitably employed under certain circumstances. That's how consumers enjoy an array of choices they can make based on the nexus of price, quality and situational benefit that suits each of them as individuals.

The salient point here is that the supply end of the equation takes its cue from what the demand end says that it wants. Billions of sovereign individuals send signals to those who have chosen a life of making and selling things by means of what they do and do not choose to spend their money on.

Industrial policy - which is what Trump, Biden and all the others Williamson mentions are actually calling for - deprives those billions of sovereign individuals of their choice of what signals to send. The decision about what will be made and sold is made in a top-down fashion.

It's couched in the rhetoric of compassion and patriotism. Advocates of industrial policy know that they can stir hearts by appeals to the idea that a product being made in America - from extraction of the basic materials to intermediate refining thereof to crafting of the finished thing - is inherently noble, because it puts Americans to work and fosters pride in some kind of intrinsically American craftsmanship.

But it really makes a sport out of what should be just basic human interaction. It makes teams out of nations, and deprives individual buyers of goods and services who are looking for enhancements of their lives in the maximum value that a good or service ought to have.

Alas, in an emotionally whipped-up time such as ours, this is not an easy sell. People readily lend an ear to arguments that they are somehow being shafted by some vaguely defined other and that they need a champion - in the form of government - to right such a wrong.

In such a climate, about all I'd venture to implore my fellow citizens to do is not get preoccupied in the minutiae of the supposedly important differences between Trump-style protectionism and Biden's brand. It's a shiny object that will do nothing to make you more free.