Biden’s “Made in America” Bumper Sticker Industrial Policy is Economically Primitive, Terrible Foreign Policy, Politically Moronic, and Even Racist— Introduction
A Little Analysis of What Terrifyingly Partisan Economic Nationalism Could be the Defining Economic and Foreign Policy Blunder of Our Times
“And where is it written — where is it written that America can’t lead the world in manufacturing? And I don’t know where that’s written.” —Joe Biden
“Mr Biden is taking an epoch-making political gamble. He is acting on so many fronts because he had no choice. The only way to build a majority in congress was to bolt a Democratic desire to act on climate change onto hawkish worries about the threat from China and the need to deal with left-behind places in the American heartland. On its own, each of these concerns is valid. But in terms of policy, the necessity to bind them together has led America into a second best world. The goals will sometimes conflict, the protectionism will infuriate allies and the subsidies will create inefficiencies.” — The Economist
“Planning in the specific sense in which the term is used in contemporary controversy necessarily means central planning—direction of the whole economic system according to one unified plan. Competition, on the other hand, means decentralized planning by many separate persons. The halfway house between the two, about which many people talk but which few like when they see it, is the delegation of planning to organized industries, or, in other words, monopoly.” — Friedrich Hayek ~ “The Use of Knowledge in Society”
“War is politics by other means”— Carl Von Clausewitz
Introduction
Let me just the sum up and state the absurdity of the Inflation Reduction Act, in a couple words. Otherwise unless I package it into a succinct statement, I’m afraid the essence of how chillingly awful it is might get swallowed up in all the smaller arguments I make in way of just trying, perspiringly, to assess its Hobbesian tentacular sprawl of hubris, diabolism, and cronyism, inefficiency and waste besides. But perhaps the worse were I to fail to streamline it into one or two sentences, then I would be making the point all the more effectively.
My Theory
The problem with the Inflation Reduction Act is that the US is sleepwalking into waging a preventive war by getting tough on China, all for the sake of boosting American manufacturing! Bribing the left-behind (abandoned, forgotten, ignored, etc. etc.) white working class voter with industrial American ‘jobs’ to bring him into the paternal fold of the Democratic party, to do which deploying racially targeted, “Made in America” & “Buy American” branding; in addition, antagonizing—at the risk of provoking, by trying deliberately to rally nationalist enthusiasm against—our Asian communist adversary.
More perversely, Biden is donating $368 billion roundabout in subsidies, grants, loans, and tax incentives to clean energy, all so he can wokeishly grandstand to ‘climate justice’ activists, and signal how committed the US is to dealing with climate change by taking a symbolic stand on the matter (because nothing matters more to anyone’s constituents these bitterly factional identity-riven days than to take, or to be seen to take, a stand on something)— boasting that he is incentivizing a green energy wholesale, top-down transformation of the American economy and society…
It is the most uneconomic—it is truly anti-economic (as we shall surely see)—politically grandiose, maniacal, dastardly ploy, masquerading as urgent policy, to blend ‘climate justice’ grandstanding with pandering to white supremacy, through and by means of pandering to white supremacy, recklessly channelling and propagating the convenient illusion of the Chinese aggressor state for the bipartisan foundation, to use as the principal juggernaut with which to pursue the state ownership of the means of production for progressive ideological ends on a scale not seen since the New Deal.
For however much more power the increasingly unchecked executive wants these days—from Obama to Trump to Biden—sooner or later he must fall back on the China scapegoat (sort of a default setting) to hide his own semi-authoritarian tendencies. But there is a high price for the narcissistic delusion of economic populism. Besides the impending tax increases, the market distortions, and the mass misallocation of resources, it’s very likely if not certain to wreak, it comes at the added expense to national security of needlessly escalating sino-American tensions, as well as alienating our allies in Europe and the pacific with our trade protectionism, meanwhile making the whole world poorer in the process.
Indeed, America’s selfish nationalism may ignite (and it is already starting) a global trade war; as, in the middle of inflation and a global energy crisis, we stiff our allies who push back and erect their own trade barriers, and their own subsidies, our NATO allies notably whose full multilateral cooperation we need to maintain, not just to continue to supply and in every way support Ukraine, but also to stand against China, were China to start to pose more of a real threat, say by invading Taiwan, or if they were to actually do something besides sending us balloons.
But Biden’s strategy in his schizoid capacity, as Green New Deal socialist/ white nationalist demagogue is: pacify the xenophobic, hateful bloodthirsty insurrectionists who denied you won your own election by patronizing their unconscionable grievances with steady noble ‘American’ factory jobs with steady wages; and, signal your climate devotion and pledge slavish obedience to the snobbish clique of climate panic, through flexing the indefatigable strength of your resolve to break the budget with the ever multiplying billions (economists are still trying to reckon exactly how much it’s going to cost in the hundreds of billions).
An intriguing matchmaker Biden is proving himself to be, contriving to wed white rage with climate catastrophism. No one can say it’s not original. Whatever happens—barring world war 3, trade wars, taxes—this is a staggering, if not infuriating, work of almost Pollockian abstract art.
The Pollock-Krasner Foundation ARS, NY and DACS, London 2015/Munson Williams Proctor Arts Institute/Art Resource, NY/Scala, Florence
This is the beginning of what is to be a series of articles I’m writing on the IRA and the delusions of my own country. Part one about the dangers and foolishness of industrial policy and protectionism comes next week.
—Jay