WHEN TECHNOCRATS GO WRONG.

Veronique de Rugy starts polemical, taking on the latest incarnation of industrial policy, which is currently seasoned with a lot of China envy in the manner of High Thomas Friedman.

Why should we want America to become more like China? Here's yet another politician thinking that somehow, the same government that started a war in Iraq on faulty intelligence, botched the launch of HealthCare.gov, gave us the Solyndra scandal, and can't keep either Amtrak or the Postal Service solvent, can effectively coordinate a strategic vision for American manufacturing.

Her argument is straightforward and should be familiar to regular readers. That is, the expertise of Wise Experts is limited to their expertise.

U.S. industrial policies launched in response to the rise of Japan in the 1980s and the USSR before that failed, not because American policy mavens weren't smart enough to do things right. The real problem with industrial policy, economic development strategy, central planning or whatever you want to call these interventions is that government officials are inescapably plagued by ignorance of localized knowledge. Government officials cannot outperform the wisdom of the market at picking winners. In fact, government intervention in any sector creates distortions, misdirects investments toward politically favored companies, and hinders the ability of unsubsidized competitors to offer better alternatives. Central planning in all forms is poisonous to innovation.

Exactly. Plus industrial policy is a way of generating rents and creating a swamp that has to be drained. I thought we had enough of Government Czars forty years ago, but Donald Boudreaux notes no bad idea ever goes away.

Sen. Gary Peters, D-Mich., proposes to establish a new federal agency for designing and directing national industrial policy. Named the National Institute of Manufacturing, this agency would be led by what The Washington Post calls a “manufacturing czar, who could report directly to the president. This person would be called the chief manufacturing officer of the United States.”

Peters declares that “It’s important to put someone in charge.”

No. No. No. A billion times No!

Indeed not. In fact, it's not clear why anyone from Michigan would want an industrial policy czar in the first place.  A Special Commissioner for preservation, perhaps.  But a Wise Expert In Charge of Picking Winners might rule that all of Michigan's heavy industry ought be closed down, with the productive resources devoted to server farms in California, and the state turned into a nature preserve.

And what's with all this China envy anyway?

America’s extraordinary growth and prosperity are emphatically not the results of any “manufacturing czar” or of a government agency dedicated to overseeing and planning industrial development. Quite the opposite.

Our growth and prosperity are fruits of a policy and culture in which each of us with gumption is free, as the economic historian Deirdre McCloskey puts it, to “have a go” at opening businesses and innovating. We never needed the permission of officials to innovate. And we certainly never looked for entrepreneurial ideas from the likes of politicians and salaried government mandarins.

And so why does Peters think that we Americans now — with per-capita incomes more than 3½ times higher than those in China — should abandon the system of what my colleague Adam Thierer calls “permissionless innovation” in order to adopt Beijing-style bureaucratic fetters?

Well, Mr Peters is a senator, and the governing class has to give the impression of Doing Something, even when there's nothing productive that the governing class can do.