News

Rubio to challenge GOP orthodoxy with call for ‘pro-American industrial policy’ to counter China
Joseph Lawler
December, 9, 2019
Washington Examiner
 
Marco Rubio will call for the government to protect key industries and workers from the rise of China, further breaking with the libertarian-leaning GOP orthodoxy of the past decades.
 
The Republican Florida senator will present the case for a “21st-century pro-American industrial policy” in a speech Tuesday at the National Defense University, according to a draft given to the Washington Examiner.
 
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“There are moments in which the market produces an efficient outcome that doesn’t reflect our national interest, and in those moments, it is the job of policymakers to ensure the national interest is protected,” Rubio told the Washington Examiner in previewing Tuesday’s speech.
 
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[T]he speech lays out a more general case for protecting certain sectors and workers, and is sure to spark debate among conservatives, many of whom have long opposed industrial policy on the grounds that the government should not pick winners and losers.
 
Responding to the rise of China requires the U.S. to “reject the fundamentalism that argues that the greatest virtue in American policy is to maximize ‘efficiency,’” the draft speech reads.
 
“When dignified work, particularly for men, goes away, so goes the backbone of our culture,” it says. “Our communities become blighted and wither away. Families collapse, and fewer people get married.”
 
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“Only now are we beginning to awaken to the fact that China’s not some poor developing country that’s liberalizing and headed to become more like us, but is actually a near-peer competitor,” he said.
 
Read the rest here.