Thread by @SenMarcoRubio

It seems my recent articles on industrial policy in @PostOpinions and @NationalAffairs have ruffled some feathers. @JonahDispatch @veroderugy @ericboehm87 @cpgrabow

A short 🧵 on how free-market fundamentalists go off the rails. 1/11

First, as a re-cap, my argument is that markets are efficient, but don’t always work in the best interests of our country – especially when adversaries like China skew global markets in their favor with theft and subsidies. That’s not good for America. 2/11

None of the critics offer a solution to this. They seem not to be bothered by America’s dependence on Communist China for everything from our medicines to the electronics we use in our missiles. They also seem to think America’s industrial base, and our workers, are basically fine. 3/11

No, really. As one of my critics put it, the “supposed” decline of American industry “is an imagined problem.” Tell that to the millions of American workers who lost their jobs after free traders let China into the WTO. 4/11

But let’s address the criticisms. How is our industrial base really doing? Output has stagnated the past decade and a half. Productivity has declined. Employment has plummeted. And America’s share of the world market for key goods, from cars to steel, has cratered. If that’s health, I’d hate to see sickness. 5/11

The critics claim industrial policy can never work. One says “if anything can go wrong, it probably will.” If that were really the case, then Neil Armstrong never would have walked on the Moon. But industrial policy worked then, just as it has in many other cases the critics refuse to acknowledge. 6/11

Can industrial policy go wrong? Of course. But doing nothing means letting nationless corporations and foreign adversaries dictate the terms of our economy. Only the federal government has the ability – and duty – to check those forces. 7/11

All the Founders understood this. The first bill they passed was a tariff. Ronald Reagan understood it, too. He hiked tariffs to stop Japan from destroying the American auto industry via subsidized export dumping. 8/11

In the end, free-market fundamentalists are a lot like progressives, because they are more subservient to ideologies (free-trade ideology on the one hand, climate-change and DEI ideology on the other) than they are to the national interest. 9/11

Deindustrialization has wreaked havoc on the working class, made us less resilient, and corrupted our culture. I welcome debate on how best to strengthen our national security and economy. 10/11

Nevertheless, I won’t defer to Wall Street and Beijing on America’s economy. I won’t pretend everything is alright when it is not. That’s not the role of a federal policymaker. The people of Florida elected me to govern, so that’s what I’ll do. 11/11