Republicans have given up on deepest values

Also, once politicians get involved, policy priorities multiply — extending to boosting employment, expanding diversity, favoring certain states or districts, protecting specific industries and so on — and the government’s stated goals become pretexts for other motives.

Take President Biden’s recent announcement that he would rebuild Baltimore’s collapsed Francis Scott Key Bridge both “as rapidly as humanly possible” and “with union labor and American steel.” Well, which is it?

That brings us to Rubio. Take it from a longtime columnist, you can’t always blame writers for the headlines mischievous editors put on our articles. But “Why I believe in industrial policy — done right” perfectly captures the senator’s argument and the trouble with the broader right-wing fad 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 the conservative mind goes beyond industrial policy. It’s really about the use of state power generally.

Too many Republicans no longer have any problem — moral or otherwise — with government imposing its will on society, so long as the “right” people are doing it “right.” The knowledge problem, they seem to believe, is confined to the left wing.

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

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

Rubio also states that American manufacturing has suffered “decades of neglect” and that the “collapse of American manufacturing has … done incalculable harm to our nation’s social fabric.” What collapse? While it’s true that U.S. industrial employment has declined — mostly thanks to automation, not trade — industrial output has been increasing for a century.

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

I don’t share the senator’s confidence that Washington could do that if only people like him were in charge.

Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency.