"Bidenomics" involves giving lots of money or regulatory protection to politically favored big businesses in the expectation that those companies will do politically desirable things, such as hire a bunch of Americans, provide a geopolitical advantage, or advance the cultural priorities of the governing party.

Trumponomics was similar, as evident in President Donald Trump's protectionism and regular subsidization of big business. In the Trump era, many conservatives have joined Democrats in pushing for industrial policy. They reject "free-market dogma" and support "industrial planning, executed under public control."

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There's plenty of theoretical debate to have regarding the role of the government in the economy. For instance, property rights, free-trade agreements, the rule of law, and most infrastructure are all examples of state activity that props up enterprise, so where should we draw the line that government planners must not cross?

It's a tough debate. But tellingly, the specific industrial plans of Bidenomics keep getting hijacked by politics — because that's what always happens when the government gets embedded with industry.

If you reject "free-market dogma" and believe in government-industry cooperation, then the natural place to start is with U.S. support of a domestic semiconductor industry. For national security reasons, the United States needs to have a reliable supply of microchips, and if we rely totally on Communist China and Taiwan, then we are at the mercy of Communist China.

When the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company announced plans in 2020 to open a chip factory in Arizona, it was a natural occasion for Trump and later President Joe Biden to practice their business-government cooperation. Sure enough, TSMC expected handouts.

In 2022, Biden signed the CHIPS and Science Act, which was supposed to provide subsidies for the likes of TSMC. This hasn't gone very smoothly. For starters, TSMC wants more generous terms than the Biden administration originally offered.

Meanwhile, the whole thing has run over budget and behind schedule. One reason for the overrun, according to TSMC: U.S. workers were too expensive and insufficiently skilled.

"There are not enough U.S. workers who have good first-hand experience specifically on building semiconductor manufacturing facilities, and many are not familiar with the requirements for chipmaking plants," one company official said.

The proposed fix: bringing in Taiwanese workers. That might make sense economically, but it undermines some of the political aims of TrumpBidenomics. Thus the unions, which are politically favored, are calling for a ban on these workers TSMC says it needs.

This frustrates the champions of industrial policy.

Samuel Hammond is right to be frustrated. He is right that it's possible to subsidize manufacturers without giving unions every demand they have. But I think it's unrealistic to expect U.S. industrial policy to proceed smartly without being taken over by politics — because, again, industrial policy is politics.

Earlier this year, Oren Cass, perhaps the chief advocate of industrial policy on the Right, lamented how Biden was undermining semiconductor promotion by injecting culture wars.

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"In long-awaited guidance," Cass wrote, "the Department of Commerce announced an outlandish set of requirements for companies hoping to use the subsidies, most notably that they had to have plans to ensure affordable childcare for their workers. Any firm that considered childcare vital to hiring construction workers already had the option to offer it. But imposing a mandate on firms that didn't see a need seems antithetical to the goal of bolstering semiconductor competitiveness."

It seems that when you ask the government to steer the boat of industry, it often guides it into the shores of cronyism and culture wars.