SOCIALISM SUCKS. LET'S HAVE MORE OF IT.

Salon contributor Kirk Swearingen is hoping to be an English-language correspondent for Brezhnev's Pravda.  "Don't like this economy? OK, just wait for Trump and the GOP to ruin it."

No, seriously, everything is fine.

Last November, I wrote what I thought was a modest commentary about how the Biden economy was doing remarkably well, at least by most standard macroeconomic measures, and much of the corporate media wasn’t reporting about it. Job numbers were historically high, unemployment low and the U.S. had done the best of all G-7 economies in bringing down inflation resulting from the worst pandemic years.

The recent money printing has made a lot of work for government employees and consultants.  Those European countries not named Sweden had Illinois-style lockdowns. The free states reopened sooner and thus had less adjusting to something resembling normal lives likely contributed a lot to those aggregate outcomes.  Then comes a "to be sure" paragraph followed by an exhortation of the toilers to increase milk yields.

I was careful to note that my wife and I, and members of our daughters’ generation, were still feeling economic pain around the cost of food and housing, and that many younger people felt they could not get their lives started due to student debt and high housing prices.

I got considerable grief from readers for that one, but I stand by what I wrote about the Biden administration’s active economic moves and a renewed focus on industrial policy to accomplish goals that simply cannot be left to “the marketplace.” Leaving infrastructure work to the marketplace is how America wound up with so many embarrassing airports, shaky bridges and poky, increasingly dangerous trains. There are things we must do together.

When all else fails, deploy a bromide.  Apparently, though, those things we do together do not include coordinating the traffic lights in a two-stoplight town.

The money printing ensures that mortgage rates will remain high, if not at Carter malaise levels, for some time; but this time around there's a lot of friction in the housing market as people who have paid off their houses and could use the capital gains from selling those houses to move elsewhere without borrowing have trouble finding ... new buyers who have to borrow at Bidenomics mortgage rates.  Meanwhile people like Mr Swearingen might be happy the current regime is making noises about taxing those unrealized capital gains.  Be careful what you wish for.

A Pravda correspondent might be embarrassed to write that second paragraph.  Industrial policy is a delusion.  It rests on the idea that some Wise Experts with blackboards can allocate capital more effectively than the financial markets.  Last time I checked, it was tax money building and maintaining those airports and bridges: and the vaunted infrastructure law doesn't even make good this year's accumulated wear and tear on internal improvements going back to the Eisenhower era and the earlier Works Progress Administration.  Those freight train derailments?  Doomsday derailment counting.  For all of that, the rent seekers in the infrastructure lobby rate the investor owned railroads as having a physical plant in better shape than that of any of the asset classes relying primarily on tax money.  Perhaps when it comes to doing things together, capital markets and emergence do better than tax-'n-spend and Policy Wonkery.

But we have to bear with the Policy Wonkery and the pain now in order to get to that Glorious Future.

The economic benefits of the massive Infrastructure Bill and the strategic CHIPS Act are just now beginning to be realized, with much of the funding specifically targeted to help create jobs in rural areas of so-called red states. (The White House has an interactive map explaining all the efforts across the country.)

Those economic benefits are twofold: the immediate well-paying jobs and then, down the line, the new or rebuilt roads, bridges, airports, public transit, waterway infrastructure, broadband internet and microchip factories that will serve us for decades.

Let's see if I understand this.  Now those bridges, airports, public transit and the like are government assets.  If so, who wasn't taking care of them previously?  And let me repeat: the current appropriations neither make good on the accumulated deferred maintenance, nor do they provide for the upkeep on the new construction.  That's how an infrastructure grant turns into a liability.  Moreover, it appears as though if some bureaucrat decides where a microchip factory is built, that is somehow "serving us," whilst if the shared wisdom of a capital market allocates resources to a microchip factory, that's "trickle down."

Perhaps we should be grateful that the current government refers to its money printing as the relatively modest "build back better."  We've heard "great society" talk before.

Finally, apparently the best wisdom today is ... a restoration of the structure-conduct-performance approach to industrial economics.

Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan, one of the unsung heroes of the Biden team, is working to keep monopolistic companies from harming consumers and workers through price-fixing schemes, non-compete agreements and other underhanded tactics. If you didn’t catch Khan on “The Daily Show” with Jon Stewart recently, it's well worth your time.

Khan does an outstanding job of taking apart Republicans’ insincere claims about fixing the economy and supporting the working class when she explains how complex the task of protecting workers and consumers is, and how badly the FTC is outgunned by the big corporations aligned with Republicans.

We're back, in other words, to protecting competitors is the same thing as protecting competition. Thus will the next fifty years of economic policy analysis have to re-discover, then re-debate, the work of the past fifty years.