Get your ass to Pittsburgh,” barked the man whose hand was on one of the many money spigots that are irrigating the Biden administration’s industrial policy.

The barker, as reported by the Wall Street Journal, was Jigar Shah, head of the Energy Department’s Loan Programs Office — whose lending capacity has been increased 10-fold, to $400 billion, by Congress. The person on the other end of the phone call, a business executive, obediently met Shah at a clean energy conference in Pittsburgh, and five months later had a $375 million LPO loan.

Ford and its battery manufacturing partner have received from the LPO $9.2 billion that, presumably, private capital markets would not provide. If that is true, why is it true?

During the Obama administration, $535 million from the LPO disappeared when Solyndra, a green energy firm, went bust. Enthusiasts for industrial policy — federal bureaucrats masquerading as financial savants, picking economic winners (and, necessarily, losers) — insist, as usual, that this time will be different. Well.

Yellow, a trucking company that received a $700 million federal loan during pandemic-era industrial policy, is near bankruptcy, having repaid $230 — really — of the loan’s principal. Worry not: In exchange for the loan, government mandarins secured for Washington a 30 percent stake in the failing company.

Over the past decade, New York state spent almost $1 billion to build a quarter-mile-long factory for Elon Musk’s solar panel manufacturing. And $240 million on equipment that would produce 3 million panels annually. Tesla now leases the plant from the state for $1 a year; most of the manufacturing equipment, the Wall Street Journal reports, “has been sold at a discount or scrapped.” The plant was supposed to become a hub attracting ancillary enterprises; it has attracted a coffee shop. A fan of this project offers a minimalist defense: The site now provides more jobs than it did as a vacant lot.

The town of Mount Pleasant has had an unpleasant experience with Wisconsin’s fling with industrial policy. As president, Donald Trump, who shared his successor’s enthusiasm for making the private sector semipublic, said a proposed factory manufacturing LCD panels would be the “eighth wonder of the world.” As Peter Suderman has reported for Reason, after the town demolished dozens of homes and spent hundreds of millions on land and infrastructure for a still-uncompleted Foxconn factory, the town had debts larger than its operating budget. Wisconsin has cut its promise of about $4 billion in subsidies as Foxconn has cut its estimate of new jobs from 13,000 to perhaps 1,450.

Lordstown Motors, a five-year-old electric truck start-up, has filed for bankruptcy three years after Trump, allocating capital by blather, put (according to the New York Times) “immense pressure” on General Motors to find a buyer for its empty Ohio factory. (GM, subsidized by $60 million from Ohio’s industrial policy, had agreed to produce the Chevrolet Cruze through 2039.) In the first quarter of 2023, Lordstown delivered two trucks, its revenue was $189,000, its losses $171 million. Its market capitalization, about $5 billion in February 2021, was $47.49 million last month.

Today, industrial policy’s political purpose is to defuse angry populism that is blamed on “deindustrialization” displacing workers. But declines in the portions of labor forces devoted to manufacturing are normal as nations become richer, regardless of wide variations in nations’ economic policies. And the U.S. government’s would-be industrializers should hope that surly populists, who are eager to cause society’s upper crust to crumble, do not notice how industrial policy makes eager bedfellows of government bureaucrats and corporate elites — for their mutual benefit.

“National security” is invoked promiscuously to justify industrial policy that promotes “sensitive” industries, including — no kidding — sugar: Sugar import quotas cost U.S. consumers billions but promote the nation’s “food security.”

Industrial policy is also considered urgent because of America’s supposed economic anemia. The Economist, however, notes that America’s 4 percent of the world’s population has produced 25 percent of global output since 1980 despite China’s rapid rise. The poorest U.S. state, Mississippi, has a higher average income than France. The world’s top five corporations in spending on research and development are all American. Money invested in the S&P 500 in 1990 is worth four times more than if it had been invested in any other wealthy country’s stock market. The real value of U.S. industrial output is 71 percent higher than at the end of the early 1990s recession.

Advocates of industrial policy promise to reverse all this alleged failure. Trusting government’s judgment in allocating society’s resources, they might succeed.