Biden's March to State Capitalism.

"One constant among this country's pounding political waves is that most Americans would just like to sandbag their lives against Joe Biden and Donald Trump. Voters know the country's political disagreements are deep, and they deserve to have the 2024 presidential election decided on those disagreements rather than Mr. Biden's cognitive state or Mr. Trump's complex vendettas.

On this score, the public is out of luck. Their national candidate nightmare is far from over. But Mr. Biden is one lucky fella. Whether or not he and Merrick Garland hatched the indictment of a former president, the fact is no one's talking about what the Biden presidency's policies represent for the country's future.

That's dangerous, because the U.S. could be backing into a major reordering of its political and economic system without anyone taking much notice.

In April, White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan gave an important speech at the Brookings Institution. Notwithstanding that the president has reduced himself to a smiley-face emoji, Mr. Sullivan, to his credit, explained exactly what Team Biden has been doing, which is putting in place a permanent U.S. industrial policy in which the government explicitly leads, and everyone else follows.

"America," Mr. Sullivan said, "needs a deliberate, hands-on investment strategy to pull forward innovation, drive down costs, and create good jobs." He added: "A modern American industrial strategy identifies specific sectors that are foundational to economic growth, strategic from a national-security perspective, and where private industry on its own isn't poised to make the investments needed to secure our national ambitions."

Let's talk about golf. I have been struggling for the past week to figure out what bothers me so much about the announcement that the PGA Tour is creating a new golf entity with Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund. Mr. Sullivan's industrial-policy speech clarifies the problem. The problem is that everywhere you look, governments are muscling in on the lives of consenting businesses and adults.

Golf's struggle isn't just another sports business story. The PGA, which was in litigation with the Saudi Public Investment Fund over the latter's new LIV golf tour, has entered into an undefined commercial operation that will share ownership between the nonprofit PGA and the government of Saudi Arabia. Rightly understood, this is a hostile takeover of an entire American sport by a government. It's as if the National Basketball Association agreed to share common ownership with the government of China -- not beyond imagining until recently.

What we're seeing is the inexorable rise of state capitalism, a system that deploys the state's authority and money to force acquiescence to its version of social organization.

In his Brookings speech, Mr. Sullivan cites the "massive" subsidies that China has made in the "key industries of the future, like clean energy, digital infrastructure, and advanced biotechnologies." This isn't criticism. It's admiration. The rest of the speech explains why the U.S. needs to adopt the Chinese government's investment model. And this was inside the context of China's Xi Jinping's reasserting the state's foot on its top private companies, such as Alibaba.

Which is precisely what the Biden administration has done, using rulemaking and spending to subsidize and direct green industries in the U.S.

The debate over industrial policy usually turns on the economic efficiency of picking winners. My concern here has more to do with how the spread of state capitalism -- whether in China, Mexico or especially the U.S. -- is altering the essential status of the individual. If we concede that the government is the primary, or most important, source of capital, the message is clear: You're no longer a completely independent operator. You, John Q. Public, work for us, the state.

Much has been made in the golf standoff of the 2018 murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. The fact is that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is modernizing his country. But make no mistake, the state calls all the shots. I think of greater concern to some pro golfers, most prominently Rory McIlroy, is simpler: This isn't like getting paid to wear "Callaway" on your cap. Stripping away the PGA's gobbledygook about its independence, the reality is that these golfers are about to become employees of a government. 

Just as, for all intents, the employees of the once independent auto industry are now effectively working for the U.S. government's paid-for green companies.

State-led investment invariably produces a class of winners at the top. Saudi money might make pro golfers richer, just as U.S. green subsidies will make a broad swath of knowledge-based workers and investors wealthier. Mr. Biden's answer to subsidized winners at the top, or "income inequality," is to inject public money directly into the pockets of the left-behind via the kind of transfer payments embedded in the Inflation Reduction Act.

He likes to describe these payments as a matter of "dignity." But the Democrats' plan for the American future looks more to me like an also-ran consolation prize for most people. State capitalism is Joe Biden's Kool-Aid. Don't drink it." [1]

You do, what it takes, to win.

1.  Biden's March to State Capitalism. Henninger, Daniel. 
Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]. 15 June 2023: A.17.