I really enjoy the Economist overall, but I think one of their serious, long term blind spots has been around this subject: >But President Joe Biden’s abandonm

I really enjoy the Economist overall, but I think one of their serious, long term blind spots has been around this subject: >But President Joe Biden’s abandonment of free-market rules for an aggressive industrial policy has dealt it a fresh blow. Free Market is NOT the same as Free Trade. In fact, Free Trade is often in direct opposition. The Free Market is essentially an optimization system for seeking to constantly find local minimums within a given set of constraints. It requires things like information symmetry and cost internalization, as well as maintained competition to avoid falling permanently into a artificially high minimum, and a society can set the constraints to include floors and bounds on what they want in terms of basic human needs. But the sorts of Free Trade the Economist and similar have often pushed undermine all aspects of that. If a factory in Country A has to properly internalize all its costs (such as pollution) but a factory in Country B doesn't, then the output of factory B will be artificially cheaper due to getting to externalize costs. Manufacturing may move from A to B, but it's not because B has figured out how to do things more efficiently and properly won by improving the overall economy, it's because B is stealing from people. That's the opposite of what should happen. Same with other aspects, like competition or property protection. China in particular has made that heavily one way as an aspect of state policy, banning foreign entities from competing domestically on a level playing field. Which sure they can do, but there shouldn't be any coddling of that with equivalent access either. I agree that subsidies are badly inefficient, and that simple dumb protectionism is a bad idea too, but "Free Trade" should be normalized between borders to match the local Free Market or, well, we'll see exactly what we've seen has indeed happened. The Economist have been rare fools IMO for not beating the drum on that hard, and it's not a modern thing but goes back for decades at least, as long as I've been closely reading it. And the result has been a failure which has rightly angered people and mixed the genuine new wealth (efficiency) generated with artificial wealth made on the backs of others/declining living standards. That there'd be backlash is natural, and that said backlash would be broad stroke and threaten to throw the baby out with the bathwater is unfortunate but also unsurprising because it was ever thus. The Economist of all people should have been well placed to suggest principled solutions to this long ago, so it's too bad that opportunity got missed back when it would have been a lot easier to pull off.