CHIPS Act: Biden increases government to increase control over everyone’s business
Timothy P. Carney
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“Industry rows, government steers.”
That’s one description of corporatist industrial policy. Some big-government types reject socialism because of the obvious fact that the private pursuit of profit and open competition create the most wealth for the greatest number. Yet they believe that the power of free enterprise can be channeled toward politicians’ political and social goals rather than market demand.
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President Joe Biden has taken this thinking to a new level: Government subsidizes industry, government steers industry. He believes in subsidizing businesses in order to control business.
The CHIPS and Science Act, a corporatist policy that is plausibly defensible as a matter of national security, is being larded up with social engineering by the Biden administration. As our editorial explained Sunday, “in addition to complying with the burdensome and costly National Environmental Planning Act, companies accessing subsidies from this fund will also have to comply with Davis Bacon pay regulations, buy American, buy a certain set-aside percentage of source materials from minority- or female-owned businesses, run their plants on low-emission energy, and provide free child care for all employees and construction workers.”
Also, chipmakers will be downgraded if they buy their stock back from shareholders — one of two typical methods by which companies share their profits with their shareholders.
Just to take one of these conditions, the daycare-plus-two-fulltime-jobs arrangement is not the preferred arrangement by most married parents. “Nearly 60 percent of Americans,” Pew Research reported, “and a majority of both registered Republicans and registered Democrats — believe that children are better off with one parent at home than they would be in a day-care arrangement.”
Requiring employers to fund on-the-job daycare takes money away from wages and so makes it harder for a single earner to be a breadwinner. So the Biden administration is using their microchip subsidies to steer people into the arrangement the Biden administration believes is better for them and away from the arrangement they would choose.
So when you see Biden proposing to increase government spending on anything, remember that part of his thinking is once they are taking federal money, I get to coerce them into doing things my way instead of the way they want to.
Biden made this crystal clear right before the midterm elections. That’s when the White House went on its social media tirade based on the logic that if you ever accepted any federal funding of any sort, you were a hypocrite for opposing any of Biden’s proposed subsidies.
“In that light,” I wrote at the time, “you can better understand the unending desire to expand government. The more thoroughly you get everyone on the dole, even if you do it by first cutting off their access to nongovernment money, the more you get to boss everyone around…. The only sensible response is to get government out of every part of our life we can so that we preserve the standing to criticize the government.”
The White House’s CHIPS Act behavior makes an even stronger case to shrink government spending radically. The only way to preserve freedom and avoid political coercion is to get federal dollars out of everything possible.