Industrial Policy and Mitchell’s Law

Most examples of Mitchell’s Law involve government passing a bad law (increase in minimum wage) that leads to a bad consequence (fewer jobs), which then becomes the excuse for a new bad law (job training programs).

Sometimes, though, politicians don’t even wait for bad results before coming up with new excuses for bigger government.

Last year, a handful of clueless Republicans in the Senate sided with Democrats to enact Joe Biden’s scheme for industrial policy (the so-called CHIPS Act).

There were all sorts of reasons to oppose the proposal, including a miserable track record of failure for industrial policy in nations such as post-war Japan and modern-day China.

But it also should have been opposed because it opened the door for additional forms of government intervention.

Here’s a tweet from Adam Ozimek that summarizes some of the ways that the Biden Administration is using subsidies as a lure to impose a dirigiste agenda.

Here’s what has happened. Politicians have driven a lot of manufacturing away from the United States because of red tape, mandates, and taxes.

So then politicians figured they could bring production back to American with a big package of subsidies for high-tech companies.

Yet those same politicians are now attaching lots of strings to those subsidies. Companies can only get the handouts if they accept red tape, mandates, and taxes.

Here’s some of the Wall Street Journal‘s editorial on the topic.

Government subsidies are never free, and now we are learning the price U.S. semiconductor firms and others will pay for signing on to President Biden’s industrial policy. They will become the indentured servants of progressive social policy. …the Administration is using the semiconductor subsidies to impose much of the social policy that was in the failed Build Back Better bill. …Start with child care, which chip makers applying for more than $150 million in federal aid will be required to provide to their employees and construction workers. …Chip makers will also have to pay construction workers prevailing wages set by unions and will be “strongly encouraged”—i.e., required—to use project labor agreements (PLAs), which let unions dictate pay, benefits and work rules for all workers. …chip makers will have to describe their “wraparound services to support individuals from underserved and economically disadvantaged communities,” such “as adult care, transportation assistance, or housing assistance.” The Administration is imposing a cradle-to-grave welfare system via corporate subsidies.

The editorial concludes with some very sensible observations about the willful stupidity of the self-styled national conservatives who were cheerleaders for this expansion of government power.

The irony is rich because chip makers have shifted manufacturing to Asia to reduce costs. Producing chips in the U.S. is 40% more expensive than overseas. One reason is the U.S. permitting thicket. But chip makers that receive federal largesse will still have to comply with more regulation under the National Environmental Policy Act. …What a wonderful life if you’re a politician. First, pile on regulation that increase business costs. Then dangle subsidies to drive your social policy… We took a lot of grief from the big-government right for opposing the Chips Act, but these conservatives look like chumps for voting for an industrial policy that is now an engine for progressive policy. And one subsidy is never enough. …Welcome to French industrial policy.

The bottom line is that Biden got a victory, but the American economy suffered a defeat.

Politicians and bureaucrats now have a new tool that they can use to make government a bigger burden on the economy’s productive sector.

At the risk of understatement, that’s not a recipe for economic vitality and competitiveness.

American lawmakers should not by copying the policies of nations with much weaker economies.

Especially when we already know the right way to get more prosperity.

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China’s Failed Industrial Policy

One of my frustrations in life is that my friends on the left seem more interested in good intentions rather than good results.

With regards to overall public policy, I challenge them with my “never-answered question” and they are unable to respond.

With regards to specific issues such as fiscal policy, I show them my list of nations that enjoyed success with spending restraint, yet they are unable to respond when I ask for a list of nations that got good results with tax increases.

The same thing is true with industrial policy. I share lots of evidence that free enterprise is the best system for prosperity, yet they put forth zero examples for their view that we somehow will enjoy more growth if politicians and bureaucrats have power to steer the economy.

Actually, to be fair, they do offer examples. Just not good examples.

I explained last month that Japan’s experiment with industrial policy was a failure, helping to produce “lost decades” for that nation’s economy.

Today, let’s look at the other commonly cited example and explain why China is not a role model. I’ve already made this argument, but let’s put more nails in the coffin by reviewing a new working paper authored by Lee G. Branstetter (Carnegie Mellon), Guangwei Li (Shanghai Tech), and Mengjia Ren (Carnegie Mellon).

Here are some key excerpts, starting with their explanation of the key issues they addressed.

Each year, governments worldwide spend an enormous amount of money subsidizing businesses. …In this paper, we try to peek into the black box of government subsidies to businesses in the context of China. …In this paper, we…fill this gap in the literature by analyzing firm-level subsidy data for companies listed on the Chinese stock exchanges. …we explore the following questions. Which firms are likely to get higher subsidies those with higher productivity or lower productivity? Does the receipt of subsidies, especially those related to R&D and innovation or industrial and equipment upgrading, raise firms’ productivity in subsequent years?

And what did they find?

You won’t be surprised to learn that industrial policy is backfiring in China.

Our results provide little evidence to support the view that government subsidies have been given to more productive firms or that they have enhanced the productivity of the Chinese listed firms. First, at the aggregate level, subsidies seem to be allocated to less productive firms, and the relative productivity of firms’ receiving these subsidies appears to decline further after disbursement. Second, using the categorized subsidy data, we find that neither subsidies promoting R&D and innovation promotion nor subsidies promoting industrial and equipment upgrading are positively associated with firms’ subsequent productivity growth.

The first thing to understand from this study is that industrial policy meant that unproductive firms got the subsidies.

And the second thing to understand is that already low levels of productivity declined further after getting handouts.

Why? Because politicians and bureaucrats give away money on the basis of what makes political sense, not on the basis of what makes economic sense.

Which raises the obvious question of why people in the United States want to copy that failed approach?

P.S. What’s doubly frustrating about the issue of industrial policy is that there are proponents on the right as well as on the left.

P.P.S. Some advocates assert that taxpayers should provide subsidies to American companies because there are national security reasons to reduce reliance on Chinese companies. But if that’s true, that’s simply an argument for restricting economic relations with China, not an argument for domestic cronyism (or global protectionism).

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Japan’s Failed Experiment in Industrial Policy

I’ve expressed opposition numerous times to so-called industrial policy because I don’t want politicians and bureaucrats to provide special favors to certain businesses or industries at the expense of everyone else.

That’s a practice known as cronyism, and it is absurd to think that selfish, election-focused politicians somehow correctly identify and subsidize the technologies of tomorrow.

But there are still people who think government should try to steer the economy – including some supposed conservatives.

Let’s remind ourselves why this is a bad idea. Samuel Gregg of the American Institute for Economic Research has a new article about the topic for National Review.

…several polling outfits have indicated an uptick in the number of Americans who say they are disillusioned with capitalism and willing to consider socialism as an alternative. This, however, isn’t the most immediate threat to American capitalism. …It is best labeled “corporatism.” …Examples of full-blown corporatism include distinctly authoritarian regimes such as Mussolini’s Italy, Dollfuss’s Austria, and Franco’s Spain until the mid 1950s. …Following World War II, corporatism took on milder expressions. …whatever the form, corporatism creates serious political and economic problems. Even soft versions of corporatism provide established companies with political mechanisms to advance their interests over those of consumers, taxpayers, and new entrepreneurs… This undermines the ability of businesses to make necessary but often difficult changes. The chances of a business’s becoming complacent and disappearing, along with the jobs it provides, thus multiply. …The expansive versions of stakeholder capitalism favored by progressives and woke capitalists are almost indistinguishable from corporatism. …World Economic Forum chairman Klaus Schwab, for instance, wants a trinity of governments, businesses, and NGOs working together to pursue political goals that are always of the progressive variety. …Not every corporatist is a fascist, but every fascist is a corporatist. Authoritarian economics isn’t just economically foolish. It is also an affront to human liberty and dignity.

Writing in August for Reason, Michael Farren documented the failure of industrial policy.

The once-beleaguered CHIPS Act…reflect a cross-party shift toward embracing industrial policy—the idea that the government should jump into the economy with both feet and have fun getting wet. Facetiousness aside, the neoliberal era from the late 1970s through the 1990s—when economic thinking carried more political sway and resulted in massive deregulation of airlines, railroads, and interstate trucking and the privatization of the internet—is far behind us. …Whether it’s encouragement via subsidies or constraint via regulation, using the government to guide the economy is akin to thinking that just a little bit of cyanide won’t hurt. …Compounding the problem is that people, not some agnostic supercomputer, determine which industries and companies are considered worthy of a boost. Humans are subject to influence and pressure, turning industrial policy into a contest of who can secure the most government favoritism… Lastly, industrial policy motivates “unproductive entrepreneurship.” Some of the best and brightest minds inevitably withdraw from productive activities premised on voluntary exchange, and instead use their skills to find autocratic mechanisms to extract political payoffs… The crystal balls policy makers peer into are easily clouded by charlatans, and we all lose when they win.

For those who want real-world evidence, the unhappy experience of Japan is very enlightening. Adam Thierer wrote last year about the failure of industrial policy in that nation.

American pundits and policymakers are today raising a litany of complaints about Chinese industrial policies, trade practices, industrial espionage and military expansion. …In each case, however, it is easy to find identical fears that were raised about Japan a generation ago. …In 1949, the Japanese government created the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) to work with other government bodies (especially the Bank of Japan) to devise plans for industrial sectors in which they hoped to make advances. …By the late 1970s, however, U.S. officials and market analysts came to view MITI with a combination of reverence and revulsion, believing that it had concocted an industrial policy cocktail that was fueling Japan’s success at the expense of American companies and interests. …Just as Japan phobia was reaching its zenith in the early 1990s, Japan’s fortunes began taking a turn for the worse. The Japanese stock market crashed… The Nikkei Index peaked at 38,915.87 on Dec. 29, 1989, then began a dramatic fall. It has never reached that level since. …Japan suffered a brutal economic downturn that became known as the Lost Decade, which really lasted almost two decades. Microeconomic planning failures—including many missteps by MITI—were also becoming evident during this time. MITI had made a variety of industrial policy bets that were originally feared by U.S. pundits, only to become embarrassing failures a few years after inception. …by the late 1990s many scholars came to view most Japanese industrial policy initiatives as a costly bust. Marcus Noland of the Peterson Institute for International Economics noted in a 2007 study of Japanese industrial policy efforts, “Attempts to formally model past industrial policy interventions uniformly uncover little, if any, positive impact on productivity, growth, or welfare. …Perhaps most notable in this regard was the Japanese government’s own admission that the MITI model had not worked as well as planned. A 2000 report by the Policy Research Institute within Japan’s Ministry of Finance concluded that “the Japanese model was not the source of Japanese competitiveness but the cause of our failure.”

Writing for Forbes, Stuart Anderson also debunks the notion that industrial policy helped Japan.

…it appears each generation must relearn the lessons of the past as today governments in China, Europe and the United States support industrial policy. Policymakers are convinced that government planning will make national economies better than market forces. “Industrial policy in Japan was not responsible for the country’s economic achievements in the post-war era or the international performance of leading sectors, including autos and electrical machinery,” according to a new study by economist Richard Beason for the National Foundation for American Policy. …He found Japanese industrial policy from 1955 to 1990 did not improve growth rates by sector, provide greater efficiency through economies of scale or result in improved productivity growth or “competitiveness.” …To conduct the research, Beason examined four measures of industrial policy used by the Japanese government during the 1955-1990 period: 1) subsidized government loans to industry, 2) subsidies, 3) tariff protection and 4) tax relief. …“Industrial policy tools generally also had no positive and significant impact on productivity growth (“competitiveness”) for the various sub-periods from 1955 to 1990. …Beason notes that policymakers in Japan abandoned industrial policy, viewing the policies costly, unsuccessful.

Sadly, many American politicians now want to copy those unsuccessful policies.

Will that make the United States as bad as today’s China? Or the former Soviet Union?

Fortunately not. Today’s industrial policy is cronyism, not full-fledged central planning. But it is nonetheless a bad idea to move in the wrong direction.

P.S. Both in the past and today, industrial policy is very vulnerable to corruption.

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The Hidden Cost of China’s Statism

I wrote many years ago that China did not have a “tiger economy.”

Indeed, I subsequently pointed out that China’s growth is not impressive when compared to East Asian nations that did enjoy rapid growth.

My goal was to convince people that the U.S. should not cite China to justify bad ideas such as industrial policy.

But there’s now evidence that I was understating my argument.

Check out this tweet about how the Chinese government has exaggerated the nation’s economic output.

The above tweet comes from a fascinating article in the Economist that analyzes how authoritarian governments can’t be trusted to report accurate economic data.

It turns out that China is one of the worst offenders.

Dictators are often seen as ruthless but effective. Official gdp figures support this view. Since 2002 average reported economic growth in autocracies has been twice as fast as in democracies. But…dictators’ economic stewardship may not be as effective as they claim. New research finds that autocrats greatly overstate their countries’ economic growth. …The data showed that dictators’ reported gdp tended to grow much faster than satellite images of their countries would suggest. …cumulative gdp growth between 2002 and 2021 in countries “not free” is nearly cut in half: from 147% to 76%. …In a related study Jeremy Wallace, a researcher, found misreporting by Chinese provinces, too. As he notes, a leaked American diplomatic cable from 2007 revealed the view of Li Keqiang, the prime minister, then a provincial party secretary. He had said, with a smile, that gdp figures were “for reference only”

Here’s a more detailed version of the above image.

The gray circle near the top right is what the Chinese government is telling the world. The red circle much lower on the graph shows the real performance of the Chinese economy based on satellite data.

This data is bad news for the Chinese people. And it’s an indictment of President Xi, who is pushing China in the wrong direction – toward more statism and more government control.

So I’m not surprised that the geese with the golden eggs are escaping.

But I continue to be amazed that some of the fools in Washington want to copy bad Chinese policy.

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D.C. Politicians Are Pushing Industrial Policy

Politicians in Washington very much like the idea of industrial policy.

Steve Forbes, however, warns that legislation to expand cronyism would be a very bad idea.

As Steve notes, politicians foolishly claim we need our own version of industrial policy so we can compete with China’s industrial policy.

But China is suffering in part because of that form of intervention.

So why on earth do American politicians think we should copy the policies of a nation where living standards are only a fraction of U.S. levels?

The bad news, as James Pethokoukis recently observed for the American Enterprise Institute, is that this pork-barrel legislation may soon get through Congress.

…during President Biden’s State of the Union address…he said it was “so important” for Congress to pass something called the “Bipartisan Innovation Act.” To the best of just about anyone’s knowledge, no such legislation existed. Save the “senior moment” wisecracks. Biden was breaking out a new name for a couple of bills making their way through the House and Senate. …few Americans have ever heard of the House’s America Competes Act or the Senate’s U.S. Innovation and Competition Act, despite their huge price tags. But they might want to get up to speed, ASAP. …there’s the substance of the bills themselves, …the parts that seem intent on mimicking top-down Chinese industrial policy, such as the funding for semiconductor manufacturing and efforts to create “Regional Technology and Innovation Hubs” across America.

So what will happen if politicians approved this example of cronyism?

The easy answer is that we will have more politicization of the economy. And that’s not a good outcome.

The Wall Street Journal opined on this legislation last year.

Competition with China will define the coming decades, and Congress wants to get into the game. Alas…the Senate’s nearly 1,500-page Innovation and Competition Act that won’t help innovation or competitiveness. …the bill’s bipartisan support has less to do with China than with its typical Congressional spending blowout and parochial politics. …political strings…always attach to industrial policy. Companies left to their own devices will allocate capital to its most productive use, but government subsidies will steer investment where politics directs. …Many Republicans support the bill because they believe the U.S. needs to mimic Beijing’s directed capital to defeat Beijing. But the U.S. strength has always been its capitalist system, which encourages private investment and innovation through market competition, strong intellectual property rights, and, yes, profits. That’s how the U.S. transcended Japan’s challenge in the 1980s and 1990s. …China’s strategy has long been to subsidize inefficient state-owned enterprises and national champions like Huawei, which has hamstrung smaller potential competitors. …The China challenge requires a better response than the U.S. has mustered to date. But the industrial policy of this bill will waste taxpayer money and divert private capital to less efficient purposes. America can’t out-compete China by imitating it.

Veronique de Rugy also addressed this issue last year.

Here are excerpts from her National Review column.

Industrial policy looks great on paper. The government simply has to identify an industry that needs support, prop it up with subsidies, loans, tax breaks, or protect it from foreign competition with tariffs and other trade regulations, and we will be on our way to fixing many of our problems. …the winners picked by the government may not all turn out to be the champions we hope they will become. …And yet, we continue to believe that somehow, this time, industrial policy will work better. You even hear conservatives make arguments like, “It works in China, so we have to do the same.” It’s as if some people are convinced that the problems that have plagued past and current central-planning efforts in the U.S. government don’t exist in China. But the truth is that China’s successes may not look as good relative to the U.S. if you look closely at the data and facts.

Veronique is right. China is not a role model

Just like the Soviet Union was not a role model.

Just like Japan of the 1980s was not a role model.

Industrial policy has always been a failure, anywhere and everywhere, whether done on a big scale (central planning) or a small scale (business subsidies).

Free markets are the right answer. Though I guess it is not much fun being a politician if your role is to simply leave people alone.

P.S. In his article, Pethokoukis expresses sympathy for having the government fund basic research instead of picking winners and losers. I think he is far too optimistic about getting good results with government-financed research and development.

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Gimmicky Public Policy from Japan

It’s hard to be optimistic about Japan’s economic future, in large part because the burden of government is expanding thanks to an aging population and a tax-and-transfer entitlement system.

Maintaining that approach is a recipe for ever-higher taxes (especially since Japan already has record levels of debt).

And Japanese politicians definitely have been grabbing more money, enabled to a considerable extent by a money-grabbing value-added tax.

To make matters worse, the country’s economy has not enjoyed much growth ever since a bubble burst about thirty years ago.

Sadly, the current prime minister, Fumio Kishida, doesn’t seem to have any sensible ideas for his country.

Instead, as reported by Ben Dooley and Hisako Ueno in the New York Times, he’s latched on to a very silly proposal.

Japan’s prime minister…wants…to…Give…employees a substantial raise. The reasoning is simple. Wage growth has been stagnant for decades in Japan, the wealth gap is widening and the quickest fix is nudging people…to pay their employees more. Higher wages, the thinking goes, will jump-start consumer spending and lift Japan’s sputtering economy. …the prime minister is calling on employers to increase pay as much as 4 percent in 2022. Companies that comply will be allowed to increase their overall corporate tax deductions by up to 40 percent. …Mr. Kishida said…Increasing pay “is not a cost,” he added. “It’s an investment in the future.”

Kishida’s scheme is a bizarre mix of industrial policy and Keynesian economics.

He wants a special loophole in the tax code, but only if companies jump through certain hoops.

All based on the flawed notion that consumer spending drives the economy (it’s actually the economy that drives consumer spending).

Unsurprisingly, the private sector isn’t very impressed by the prime minister’s approach.

Business groups, union leaders and others have questioned the feasibility… That businesses would resist increasing wages even when essentially paid to do so shows just how intractable the problem is. Years of weak growth…have left companies little room to raise prices. …The reaction to the wage proposal is an inauspicious sign for Mr. Kishida, who took office two months ago promising to…put Japan’s economy back on track through a “new capitalism.”

Kishida’s “new capitalism” sounds even worse than some of the gimmicky ideas that have been pushed on the right in the United States (reform conservatism, common-good capitalism, nationalist conservatism, and compassionate conservatism).

From an economic perspective, he needs to learn that sustained higher wages are only possible if there’s more productivity, which translates into more income for both companies and workers.

And that’s not a description of what we find in Japan.

…there is the issue of unprofitability. For nearly a decade, a majority of Japanese businesses have been unprofitable — around 65 percent in 2019, the lowest figure since 2010. They have been kept afloat by cheap money underwritten by the Bank of Japan, but no profits mean no corporate tax liability, so those businesses would not be eligible for Mr. Kishida’s incentives.

The bottom line is that Japan’s political elite has been marching steadily in the wrong direction, and they never seem to learn from previous mistakes.

The government has long tried to find something, anything, to stimulate the economy and push up prices. It has pumped money into financial markets and made borrowing nearly free. But it’s been to little avail…the Japanese government has turned to even larger amounts of stimulus, showering consumers with cash handouts and companies with zero-interest loans. …In 2013, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe introduced a similar plan, with little success. Today, average wages remain stuck at around $2,800 a month, about the same level as two decades ago.

P.S. Part of the problem is that Japanese politicians may be listening to terrible advice from left-leaning bureaucracies such as the International Monetary Fund and Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

P.P.S. Here’s another example of a foolish gimmick by Japanese politicians.

P.P.P.S. And let’s not forget that Japan may win a prize for the strangest example of regulation.

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A Primer on Free Enterprise vs. Big Government

I’ve made the case for capitalism (Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, and Part V) and the case against socialism (Part I, Part II, and Part III), while also noting that there’s a separate case to be made against redistribution and the welfare state.

This video hopefully ties together all that analysis.

If you don’t want to spend 10-plus minutes watching the video, I can sum everything up in just two sentences.

1. Genuine socialism (government ownership, central planning, and price controls) is an utter failure and is almost nonexistent today (only in a few basket-case economies like Cuba and North Korea).
2. The real threat to free enterprise and economic liberty is from redistributionism, the notion that politicians should play Santa Claus and give us a never-ending stream of cradle-to-grave goodies.

For purposes of today’s column, though, I want to focus on a small slice of the presentation (beginning about 2:00).

Here’s the slide from that portion of the video.

I make the all-important point that profits are laudable – but only if they are earned in the free market and not because of bailouts, subsidies, protectionism, or a tilted playing field.

This is hardly a recent revelation.

I first wrote about this topic back in 2009.

And many other supporters of genuine economic liberty have been making this point for much longer.

Or more recently. In a new article for City Journal, Luigi Zingales emphasizes that being pro-market does not mean being pro-business.

The first time I visited the Grand Canyon many years ago, I was struck…by a sign that said, “Please don’t feed the wild animals.” Underneath was an explanation: you shouldn’t feed them because it’s not good for them. …We should post something of this kind on Capitol Hill as well—with the difference being that the sign would read, “Please don’t feed the businesses.” That’s not because we don’t like business. Quite the opposite: we love business so much that we don’t want to create a situation where business is so dependent on…a system of subsidies, that it is unable to compete and succeed… This is the…difference between being pro-market and being pro-business. If you are pro-business, you like subsidies for businesses; you want to make sure that they make the largest profits possible. If, on the other hand, you are pro-markets, you want to behave like the ranger in the Grand Canyon: …ensuring that markets remain competitive and…preventing businesses from becoming too dependent on a crony system to survive.

Amen.

Cronyism is bad economic policy because government is tilting the playing field and luring people and businesses into making inefficient choices.

But I also despise cronyism because some people mistakenly think it is a feature of free enterprise (particularly the people who incorrectly assume that being pro-market is the same as being pro-business).

The moral of the story is that we should have separation of business and state.

P.S. There’s one other point from Prof. Zingales’ article that deserves attention.

He gives us a definition of capitalism (oops, I mean free enterprise).

We use the term “free markets” so often that we sometimes forget what it actually means. If you look up “free markets” in the dictionary, you might see “an economy operating by free competition,” or better, “an economic market or system in which prices are based on competition among private businesses and not controlled by a government.”

For what it’s worth, I did the same thing for my presentation (which was to the New Economic School in the country of Georgia).

Here’s what I came up with.

By the way, the last bullet point is what economists mean when they say things are “complementary.”

In other words, capital is more valuable when combined with labor and labor is more valuable when combined with capital – as illustrated by this old British cartoon (and it’s the role of entrepreneurs to figure out newer and better ways of combining those two factors of production).

One takeaway from this is that Marx was wrong. Capital doesn’t exploit labor. Capital enriches labor (just as labor enriches capital).

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Economic Backsliding by China, Part I

Long-time readers know that I periodically pour cold water on the notion that China is an economic superstar.

Yes, China did engage in some economic liberalization late last century, and those reforms should be applauded because they were very successful in reducing severe poverty.

But from a big-picture perspective, all that really happened is that China went from terrible policy (Maoist communism) to bad policy (best described as mass cronyism).

Economic Freedom of the World has the best data. According to the latest edition, China’s score for economic liberty rose from a horrible 3.69 in 1990 to 6.21 in 2018.

That’s a big improvement, but that still leaves China in the bottom quartile (ranking #124 in the world). Better than Venezuela (#162), to be sure, but way behind even uncompetitive welfare states such as Greece (#92), France (#58), and Italy (#51).

And I fear China’s score will get even worse in the near future.

Why? Because it seems President Xi is going to impose class-warfare tax increases.

In an article for the Guardian, Phillip Inman shares some of the details.

China’s president has vowed to “adjust excessive incomes” in a warning to the country’s super-rich that the state plans to redistribute wealth… The policy goal comes amid a sweeping push by Beijing to rein in the country’s largest private firms in industries, ranging from technology to education. …Xi…is expected to expand wealth taxes and raise income tax rates… Some reforms could be far reaching, including higher taxes on capital gains, inheritance and property. Higher public sector wages are also expected to be part of the package.

And here are some excerpts from a report by Jane Li for Quartz.

Chinese president Xi Jinping yesterday sent a stark message to the country’s wealthy: It is time to redistribute their excessive fortunes. …Another reason for the Party’s focus on outsize wealth is to reduce rival centers of power and influence in China, which has also been an impetus for its crackdown on the tech sector… China already has fairly high income tax rates for its wealthiest. That includes a top income tax rate of 45% for those who earn more than 960,000 yuan ($150,000) a year… Upcoming moves could include…a nationwide property tax.

These stories may warm the hearts of Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders, but they help to explain why I’m not optimistic about China’s economy.

If you review the Economic Freedom of the World data, you find that China is especially bad on fiscal policy (“size of government”), ranking #153.

That’s worse than China does even on regulation.

Yet the Chinese government is now going to impose higher taxes to fund even bigger government?!?

Is the goal to be even worse than Venezuela and Zimbabwe?

P.S. Many wealthy people in China (maybe even most of them) achieved their high incomes thanks to government favoritism, so there’s a very strong argument that their riches are undeserved. But the best policy response is getting rid of industrial policy rather than imposing tax increases that will hit both good rich people and bad rich people.

P.P.S. I’ve criticized both the OECD and IMF for advocating higher taxes in China. A few readers have sent emails asking whether those international bureaucracies might be deliberately trying to sabotage China’s economy and thus preserve the dominance of Europe and the United States. Given the wretched track records of the OECD and IMF, I think it’s far more likely that the bureaucrats from those organizations sincerely support those bad policies (especially since they get tax-free salaries and are sheltered from the negative consequences).

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U.S. vs. China: You Don’t Beat Cronyism with Cronyism

China is not going to surpass the United States as the world’s dominant economy.

As I first wrote back in 2010, China is a paper tiger. Yes, there was some pro-market reform last century, which helped reduce mass poverty, but China only took modest steps in the right direction.

According to the latest edition of Economic Freedom of the World, China scores just 6.21, which places it 124th out of 162 nations.

Is that better than a score of 3.69, which is where China was in 1990?

Yes, of course.

But does that score indicate that China will become richer than the United States, which has a current score of 8.22 (the world’s 6th-highest level of economic liberty)?

Of course not.

My answer might change of China engaged in more economic liberalization, as I have urged. But it seems the opposite is happening and China is backsliding toward more state control.

And that means the United States almost surely will remain far more prosperous.

(While Joe Biden is doing his best to drag economic policy in the wrong direction, but it would takes decades of far-worse policy to bring the U.S. down to the level of France (#58) or Greece (#92), much less all the way down to being on par with China).

But some people must not be very familiar with data about China and its economy.

For instance, President Trump’s former top trade official, Robert Lighthizer, wrote that the United States should copy China’s cronyism in a column in the New York Times.

I’m not joking. Mr. Lighthizer openly embraces industrial policy and protectionism.

…we need a multifaceted long-term strategy. …Our strategy must include…an industrial policy that includes subsidies to foster the development of the most advanced science and technology…and a robust plan to combat China’s unfair trade practices. …The Senate legislation would achieve some of what is needed. It calls for $200 billion to bolster scientific and technological innovation, $52 billion to rebuild our capacity to make semiconductors, and a supply-chain resiliency program… The House should perfect the provisions of the Senate bill that restructure and enhance federal support for science and innovation and strip out those that weaken our trade laws and encourage Chinese imports.

Geesh, no wonder Trump’s trade policy was such a disaster.

Lighthizer not only doesn’t understand economics, he also doesn’t know history.

Adam Thierer of the Mercatus Center points out that the current angst about China is a repeat verse of a song we heard over and over again in the late 1980s.

Back then, everyone though Japan was on the verge of overtaking the United States, ostensibly because that nation had wise politicians and bureaucrats who knew how to pick winners and losers.

Thierer’s article tells us what really happened.

In 1949, the Japanese government created the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) to work with other government bodies (especially the Bank of Japan) to devise plans for industrial sectors in which they hoped to make advances. Although not as heavy-handed as Chinese planning authorities are today, MITI came to have enormous influence over private-sector research and investment decisions during the next five decades. The organization used a variety of the same policy levers that Chinese officials do today, with a particular focus on trade management and industrial policy investments in sectors perceived to be “strategic” for future economic advance. …By the late 1970s…, U.S. officials and market analysts came to view MITI with a combination of reverence and revulsion, believing that it had concocted an industrial policy cocktail that was fueling Japan’s success at the expense of American companies and interests. …By the end of the 1980s, fears about “Japan Inc.” had reached a fever pitch. …Just as Japan phobia was reaching its zenith in the early 1990s, Japan’s fortunes began taking a turn for the worse. The Japanese stock market crashed in 1990… Japan suffered a brutal economic downturn that became known as the Lost Decade, which really lasted almost two decades. …by the late 1990s many scholars came to view most Japanese industrial policy initiatives as a costly bust.

Amen.

I wrote that Japan was a “basket case” back in 2013. A bit of hyperbole, to be sure, but I was trying to drive home the point that the nation’s politicians have made some costly mistakes.

Not just industrial policy, but also tax increases, Keynesian spending, and other forms of intervention.

No wonder the country has gone downhill in terms of competitiveness.

But let’s not focus too much on Japan (which, despite all my grousing, still ranks #20 for economic liberty).

For purposes of today’s column, the main points are 1) that China is no threat to overtake the United States, and 2) that copying that nation’s industrial policy would be a mistake.

P.S. If China wants to pursue industrial policy and other forms of cronyism, that’s a mistake that mostly hurts the Chinese people. To the extent such policies are designed to subsidize exports (as Lighthizer argues), the best response is to utilize the World Trade Organization, not to copy China’s misguided interventionism.

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Lessons from 19th Century Cronyism

Politicians often support “industrial policy,” which means they get to grant special favors to well-connected companies or industries.

But as explained by Professor Burton Folsom, this approach didn’t work very will in the 1800s.

It’s not surprising, of course, that politicians like having the power to grant favors. It makes them feel important.

But such policies don’t work. At least if our measure of success includes things like competitiveness and efficiency. Or of if we care about the best interests of consumers and taxpayers.

Which is why is better to be on the correct side of this spectrum. In other words, as far from Soviet-style central planning as possible (I used to cite Hong Kong as an example of laissez-faire, but that may no longer be accurate).

By the way, the video also makes a good point about how the United States was not a laissez-faire paradise back in the 1800s.

While we didn’t have an income tax or a welfare state, there were other forms of intervention, as illustrated by the video, as well as lots of protectionism and regulation.

And don’t forget slavery, which was an especially grotesque anti-market policy.

The bottom line is that only politicians benefit when government has more power over the economy.

For the rest of us, the lesson to be learned is that government intervention doesn’t work. Not in the 1800s. Not in the 1900s. And not in this century, either.

If we want more prosperity, we should stick with the tried-and-true recipe for growth.

P.S. Professor Folsom also narrated a video showing how government intervention failed in the 1800s (railroads) and early 1900s (airplanes).

P.P.S. It’s especially disappointing that some self-styled conservatives are supporting industrial policy since – in practice – it means awful policies like Solyndra-style handouts and power-grab schemes like the Green New Deal.

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The “Grabbing Hand” of Industrial Policy

If you want to understand how government really works, learn about “public choice.”

This is the common-sense theory that politicians and other people in politics often make decisions based on self interest, and it does a very good job of explaining why we get so many short-sighted and misguided policies from the crowd in Washington.

Public choice is especially insightful when compared to the naive view that politicians are mostly concerned with helping ordinary people.

The theory also tends to generate some pithy concepts, such as “stationary bandit” and “predatory government.”

Another example is “grabbing hand,” which describes how intervention usually is a vehicle for helping government rather than helping people.

Today’s column is going to be about industrial policy (the incrementalist version of central planning) as an example of this phenomenon.

Specifically, we’re going to look at a new academic study that measured the impact of government control on the performance of companies in China.

Written by Marzieh Abolhassani, Zhi Wang, and Jakob de Haan, it’s a test of whether government is a “helping hand” or “grabbing hand.”

We’ll start with their description of the study’s methodology.

…the impact of government involvement on the financial performance of listed firms in emerging economies has received scant attention. This paper examines the relationship between government control of firms and firms’ financial performance for the case of China. …we measure government control by the fraction of outstanding shares held either directly or indirectly by the government. …We classify firms as state controlled whenever the government is the shareholder with the largest number of shares held either directly or indirectly through pyramid structures.

Here are the key results.

Our empirical results suggest that firm performance is generally lower for firms where the government is the shareholder with the largest number of (direct and indirect) shares. Specifically, the return on assets, the return on equity and the market-to-book ratio are, on average, 1.3%, 2.0% and 8.2% lower for government-controlled firms. Both central and local government control is undermining firm performance. These findings provide support for the ‘grabbing hand’ theory of the government. … we make sure the estimates are not driven by differences in the size, age and leverage of the firms. Importantly, we also control for industry-region-year fixed effects, and therefore compare firms within the same industry in the same province during the same year, further enhancing the credibility of our estimates. …These results provide support for hypothesis and to theories conjecturing that management of firms controlled by the government have fewer incentives to maximize profits and shareholder value.

For those who like the wonky details, here are the key findings from their number crunching.

So what’s the bottom line?

Their conclusion tells us everything we need to know.

The results reported in this study broaden our understanding of the role of government influence on firm performance. …Our empirical results indicate that government-controlled firms have a worse financial performance than non-government-controlled firms. …These conclusions support the ‘grabbing hand’ theory proposed by Shleifer and Vishny.

So why do these results matter?

From an economic perspective, it’s further evidence that government intervention leads to a misallocation of resources. And that inevitably means living standards will be lower than they would be if markets were allowed to function.

A recent article from Foreign Affairs suggests enormous potential benefits if China ended industrial policy.

…state-owned enterprises… These inefficient behemoths control nearly $30 trillion in assets and consume roughly 80 percent of the country’s available bank credit, but they contribute only between 23 and 28 percent of GDP. …The economist Nicholas Lardy has estimated that genuine economic reforms, in particular those targeting state-owned enterprises, could boost China’s annual GDP growth by as much as two percentage points in the coming decade.

Very similar to what I’ve written, so let’s hope that China returns to the policy of economic liberalization that led to genuine progress.

I’ll close with the depressing observation that there are people in Washington who are now agitating for industrial policy in the United States.

Needless to say, there’s zero reason to think that intervention from Washington will produce results that are better than intervention from Beijing.

P.S. It doesn’t matter if Republicans are trying to pick winners or Democrats are trying to pick winners. When politicians intervene, the economy suffers, which means less prosperity for ordinary people.

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