Before the gale-force hurricane of Reaganomics swept through the United States in the 1980s, America very briefly entertained the adoption of a deliberate industrial policy. As in South Korea and certain European nations, the U.S. government would pick economic winners and losers and direct funds accordingly.
This was no utopian idea. After World War II, a number of European governments invested heavily in key sectors -- electricity, steel -- to close the technology gap with the United States. Similarly, the South Korean government built up a shipbuilding industry in the 1970s from nothing into the largest and more successful in the world. To a certain extent, the Pentagon accomplished something similar with the Internet (though no American would dare call such a thing "socialism").
