FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: January 11, 2023

CONTACT: Ashley Woolheater, woolheater@openmarketsinstitute.org

Barry Lynn in the Washington Monthly: “Manufacturing and Liberty. As Biden strives to break China’s hold on the West, it’s time to relearn America’s no chokepoint strategy.”

WASHINGTON- Open Markets Institute Executive Director Barry Lynn penned a feature in this month’s edition of the Washington Monthly, “Manufacturing and Liberty,” explaining how America’s economic security and liberty now depends on rebuilding a version of industrial policy that Washington foolishly abandoned decades ago in favor of letting the monopolists rule. The critical task facing the U.S. and the world today: eliminate dangerous chokepoints in international supply chains and keep the peace while doing it.

During the Reagan era, Washington began to abandon its no chokepoints industrial strategy in favor of allowing monopolist corporations and mercantilist states to consolidate power and strip out industrial redundancies in supply chains, leaving vital production chokepointed. The result has become painfully clear: shortages and inflation of basic goods like face masks and groceries, chemicals and pharmaceutical inputs, semiconductors used in airplanes, cars and medical devices, of natural gas, baby formula, and more. Worse yet is the threat of an even greater industrial crash caused by, for instance, a conflict with China, or even a simple embargo by China of vital shipments.

The solution, Lynn writes: “design and implement a strategy to widely redistribute industrial capacity, within a world in which production and control are now highly chokepointed, without triggering industrial collapse, provoking a catastrophic conflict, or yielding to industrial coercion. Success demands that we view this task as, to a very large degree, a matter of engineering the U.S. and international industrial systems—using law and policy—to ensure their stability.”

The Biden Administration has made major strides in this direction by passing the CHIPS and Science Act and the Inflation Reduction Act. But now it needs to move fast to finish the job. 

“Done right, a new industrial strategy can help America and its allies solve most of the great crises of this moment... [U]nfortunately, today we still lack a clear hierarchy of threats to guide our decisions, an understanding of how to use competition principles and policies to achieve our ends, and a political narrative that explains why we must see this grand effort through to success,” Lynn writes.

Read the full article here.

Lynn first raised alarms about the threats posed by the extreme chokepointing of industrial capacity 20 years ago, writing the first article on the issue in June 2002, publishing the first book on the threat in July 2005, and raising the first warnings about China’s direct control over U.S. corporate leaders in October 2015.  His warnings and his proposed remedies have since been widely studied by the U.S. government, Europe, Asia, the IMF, and the OECD.

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The Open Markets Institute is a team of journalists, researchers, lawyers, economists, and advocates working together to expose and reverse the stranglehold that corporate monopolies have on our country.  Learn more at www.openmarketsinstitute.org.