Something to mull over:
“Industrial policy advocates spend much time discussing market failures, yet they are curiously blind to government failures. Markets have a built-in correction mechanism called bankruptcy; industrial policy has a built-in survival mechanism called lobbying. Politicians naturally gravitate toward projects that generate headlines, ribbon-cuttings, and grand rhetoric. In practice, the long-term technical and economic viability of those projects often becomes secondary.
Easy access to subsidies, public guarantees, and cheap loans encourage firms to become subsidy entrepreneurs rather than competitive businesses. When taxpayers absorb much of the downside risk, excessive risk-taking becomes rational — and moral hazard flourishes.
There is also a broader political danger. Large industrial-policy programs create fertile ground for rent-seeking and the gradual fusion of political and corporate interests. The result is less a dynamic market economy and more a subsidy-driven system shaped by political access.
Few intellectuals have been more influential than Mariana Mazzucato of University College London. Her 2013 book The Entrepreneurial State argued that the state has a critical role in innovation and that policymakers should actively intervene in the economy to spur development.
Mazzucato has become one of Europe’s most prominent advocates for an activist industrial policy…[She] is now promoting a new book, The Common Good Economy, which advances many of the same themes that influenced the [EU’s] Green Deal. Once again, expansive political ambitions are wrapped in morally elevated language while fundamental questions go unanswered.
The common good sounds desirable, but who gets to decide what it consists of? How do we measure whether we are achieving it?
The EU’s green vision constitutes a top-down vision of the state that replaces the decentralized wisdom of millions of entrepreneurs and consumers with the ideological preferences of a few people at the top — people who do not risk losing their money if their decisions result in failure. And, as Thomas Sowell noted, there is no more dangerous way to make decisions than to put them in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.”
- Excerpts from Why Europe’s Green Entrepreneurial State Went Bust. By Johan Norberg & Christian Sandström / National Review July 14, 2026
For the record, I’m an ardent environmentalist and a registered Democrat (admittedly more out of inertia than conviction). The guys who wrote this piece are libertarians. So what? They made good points, worthy of consideration.