Comment by mannyv
Well actually, Alexander Hamilton is the father of mercantilism. And it's been followed and promulgated by pretty much every country at some point in time.
It's not wrong, it's one strategy given the political goals of a nation. There are other strategies and other goals, like economic liberalism.
Saying a behavior or approach is wrong and/or outdated shows a particular misunderstanding of what policy is for.
What "most" economists believe in the West (and "believe in" is a perfect way to put it, because it's a belief) is economic liberalism. Underlying/embedded in that belief are a number of assumptions, policy goals, and desired outcomes.
For a limited subset of countries on earth that worldview has been incredibly successful. However, for the vast majority of countries on earth economic liberalism has been a failure, and a costly one.
Unfortunately, there aren't many new alternatives out there, and the current system is heavily biased towards economic liberalism.
But it's important to remember that all this is relatively new. The era of modern states is relatively new, and the current postwar order is well, 80 years old or so. The Wealth of Nations was only published in 1776, Report on Manufctures was in 1791, and Das Kapital was in 1867.
These are good points. In my view the idea that "making America great" entails illiberal economic policies which benefit a small fraction at the expense of the rest of the population is a non-starter because in my view "greatness" does not come from propping up outdated industries (coal extraction, steel production) and taxing everyone else to do it.
I don't think economists are ideologically opposed to central planning. There are simply enough empirical studies that show how badly it fails. In fact most of the "economic liberalization" failure stories you refer to are actually centrally planned thefts that benefit specific firms but were sold as liberalization.
China is an example of a state that does very smart central planning. Everything from its central bank to its subsidization of small businesses doing embedded systems (hence all the super cheap gear on Amazon sent via subsidized shipping to customers around the world) is intended to enhance the capability of the workforce and guide the workforce toward a future of technological change and rapid (but not too rapid) advancement.
In other words, China's industrial policy is forward-looking, America's is backward-looking. The very phrase "Make America Great Again" is backward-looking.
China's policy is essentially an education policy disguised as trade policy. Corporate espionage leads to more knowledge, subsidized shipping leads to more low-end consumer devices and engineers who need to learn to build them, etc. There thousands and thousands of low-end consumer electronics, test equipment, etc., manufactured in China that are built upon the many low-end DSP chips and microcontrollers. This is not an Apple-esque 2nm process, it's much lower tech, lower cost but it offers far, far better experience to so many more workers than all but the best educational background can offer. What percentage of first or second year US EE grads could build and ship a $50 spectrum analyzer?
In my view, China has already overtaken the US in key areas of technological innovation and the US is "copying" by deploying industrial policy that has the opposite effect and entrenches and protects top US firms while having minimal educational impact on US workers and minimal impact on educational and early career choices for US workers.