The record, in my own voice

Reason magazine reports that Vice President J.D. Vance has been citing my authority — my name, my Reports — to justify a program of governmental intervention in the economy. I am gratified that a sitting Vice President reads me. I am less gratified by what he appears to have read into me. Let me be precise, because precision is the only courtesy I owe an argument.

What I argued in the Report on the Subject of Manufactures — and I argued it at length, against strong opposition — was that a young nation dependent entirely on foreign supply of essential goods is not commercially sovereign. Infant industries, lacking the accumulated capital and skill of established rivals, cannot always compete on equal terms from the first day. Temporary, targeted encouragement — bounties, premiums, relief from duties on raw inputs — could bridge that gap and build a durable productive base. I did not argue for permanent shelter from competition, for the state to pick winners by political favor, or for a bureaucratic hand in every private transaction. Those are not my doctrines. If Vance has extended my argument to mean the government should manage markets broadly and indefinitely, Reason is right to object, and so do I.

But here is where I would push back on Reason in turn. The magazine's lead implies that any governmental role in shaping industrial capacity is a misunderstanding of markets. That is too neat. I never believed that markets, left entirely to themselves, would spontaneously generate the infrastructure and manufacturing capacity a great nation requires — especially when rival powers are using their own public instruments to build theirs. The question is not whether government acts, but how, on what terms, and subject to what check. A targeted investment in semiconductor fabrication or optical-fiber manufacturing (and I note, by inference from today's news, that Corning is doubling its capacity to serve AI data centers) is not the same thing as Soviet-style central planning. Conflating the two is a rhetorical convenience, not an economic argument.

On Milton Friedman: I did not know the man — I could not have — but I understand the tradition Reason invokes. Friedman's confidence in price signals is admirable as far as it goes. It does not go far enough when the market in question is distorted by foreign subsidies, by national-security constraints on supply chains, or by the plain fact that some capital investments are too large and too slow to return for private actors to bear alone. I built the customs service, the Coast Guard, and the Bank of the United States not because I distrusted markets but because I understood what markets require to function: sound money, enforceable contracts, reliable credit, and a national infrastructure they cannot themselves provide.

The honest verdict: Vance errs if he treats Hamilton as a patron saint of indefinite protectionism and state direction of private enterprise. Reason errs if it treats any industrial policy as a betrayal of market principles. The durable Hamilton position is narrower and more demanding than either camp prefers. Encourage what the market will not spontaneously produce; withdraw when the market can stand on its own; insist on transparency and sunset conditions so that encouragement does not harden into permanent subsidy. That is not a morass of misunderstanding. That is a policy — and it still wants champions willing to defend it with precision rather than slogans.