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Notes -
There's a fundamental issue with industrial policy where it's justified by government mandates and subsidies allowing nascent industries to develop locally. But once the justification for the power is made, they forget all about it and just throw money at things. Like how the economic concept of a non-exclusive, non-rivalrous "public good" gets repurposed to mean "goods I want the public to pay for"
Giving people money to buy solar panels from China didn't produce a local industry, it just gave certain people a ton of money at the expense of other people. Solar might be a great investment, but nothing about the government's policy did anything to influence that except add more slack for malinvestment and the nightmare of scams residential solar loans turned into.
Ironically the Biden tariffs and manufacturer subsidies are an actual piece of industrial policy, but decades too late and at odds with literally every other government policy pushing manufacturing off shore. Ironically harming the natural process of solar adoption more than.ending all solar subsidies would have.
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