I like it, although some rival will probably call it a flip-flop: in an interview with Bloomberg’s Peter Cook, Rudy Giuliani lays out why there might be times where it’s okay to have some subsidies for some priorities, and why overall, a free-market approach is often the best:

“I am a free market Republican, I am against subsidies in most cases, but I also realize … [energy independence] has gotten beyond even just the economy and it’s gotten beyond globalization. It’s a national security problem now, a national security issue that America be energy independent. And I would do everything I could to stimulate the private sector to do this, but where it couldn’t, I would take them the extra way. We have to be energy independent, no ifs, no ands, no buts. And we need someone as president, like me, who can gets things done and doesn’t just talk about things.” “Globalization is one of the best things for our future. It’s something we have to embrace like when I first wrote those 12 Commitments, I think I used the term embrace globalization. … This is great news for America, that people are coming out of poverty in China and in India. And really it’s the difference between a Republican president who’s an optimist, and a Democratic president, who’s got his head in the sand and wants to just protect our prior inefficiencies. … For a country like ours – that’s an optimistic, entrepreneurial country, we should be cheering globalization, this is a great thing for America. And we’ve got to take advantage of it and we need leaders who can show us how to take advantage of it.” “You need a Republican president who understands the free market, how to deal with it, how to find new jobs for us. … Looking in the rearview mirror is not the way to help American workers, it’s looking forward. What are the new jobs you can do? How can we train them? What are the new industries? What are things that we can sell to this emerging market? America, … when it gets into this protectionism thing, we really decline.”

I think it is conservative — in the ‘prudent’ meaning — to say, “sometimes, when circumstances demand it, we do A, and sometimes, in other circumstances, we do B.” The question is whether some rival will say that stands like that are ipso facto inconsistency.