Adam Thierer of the R Street Institute writes about why subsidies and industrial policy are not the answer to spur innovation:

Writing in the American Conservative recently, Wells King of American Compass offers a concise articulation of this new thinking. Channeling President Barack Obama’s infamous 2012 “you didn’t build that” speech, King decries the so-called “founding myth” of the information-technology sector, and claims that “Silicon Valley was the product of aggressive public policy” and enlightened technocratic design. He also rails against the idea that America’s digital-era ethos of “permissionless innovation” had anything to do with the success of the internet, insisting instead that the system’s Cold War–era origin as a government-subsidized network constitutes “a remarkable success of industrial planning.”
This is revisionist history of the highest order. Science writer Matt Ridley calls this sort of thinking “innovation creationism,” or the notion that it basically takes a village to raise an innovator. Supporters of grandiose industrial-policy planning and splashy public-spending programs ignore all the inefficiencies, cost overruns, cronyism, and bad bets on economic-development gambits that were almost doomed to fail from the start. Revisionists such as King prefer instead to cherry-pick a few stories in which government seems to have helped, and then suggest that the economy be reorganized according to a grand new top-down blueprint, specifying which types of innovation will get public support.

E. J. Antoni of the Heritage Foundation writes about the Fed’s monetary-policy predicament:

In a classic case of outsmarting themselves, the economists at the Fed seemed to have found a way to create money for the government to spend while avoiding the negative consequences, chiefly inflation. But the ramifications of this monetary malfeasance were only delayed, not denied. To understand why, we need to go back to the last time the Fed avoided massive inflation after record-setting money creation: the 2008 global financial crisis.

Richard Morrison of the Competitive Enterprise Institute writes about the future political battles to be waged over ESG:

Although there will be no change in control of the Senate, all the gavels in the House of Representatives are currently being handed from D to R hands. Now, slim control of one chamber with a president of the opposing party is no way to pass any meaningful legislation, but it does give combative committee chairmen with a long list of targets a green light for high-profile interrogations, setting up a series of oversight hearings that could put history’s greatest dramatists to shame. Expect committees such as Financial Services and Judiciary to bring everyone from Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) chairman Gary Gensler to BlackRock CEO Larry Fink up to Capitol Hill for an uncomfortable series of questions about how boycotting oil and gas investment, diversity mandates, and support for abortion have become de rigueur in the world of corporate policymaking.