What is the basic fallback principle to which Americans tend to revert when confronted with hard questions of industrial policy? It is that “free markets” are generally better at organizing economic activity for wealth and profit and promoting general progress than are government plans. The idea of “government planning” is anathema to most Americans.
It brings to mind visions of the five-year plans of the Soviet Union, or the political discomfort of allowing the government to pick winners and losers, as in modern Japan. This strikes most Americans as just plain wrong. It is far better, goes the thinking, to allow people the freedom to take risks, and one hopes to come up with better ideas, if not better mousetraps…