This is John Batchel, conversation with Professor John Cochran of Stanford University.

He's at the Hoover Institution about planned economy, about state policy, about the CHIPS Act.

What can go wrong and why when the government directs investment and how investment should be spent

and what the regulations are if you take government money.

John Cochran lists some of the challenges for the Chips Act, the latest version of the planned economy in America.

More of this later in the week.

And union labor requirements made in America requirements, environmental requirements,

consulting with native tribes on their ways of knowing requirements and so forth. Yes, one of the

problems is that industrial policy, subsidies, protections, always, especially in the U.S.,

which is a responsive democracy, end up being subverted to all the various

political interests who want a slice of the pie, and then they eat the pie and not much is left.

The fundamental problem of planning is information. So it seems, you know, why can't the planners

in Washington allocate things where it belongs to

go? But they don't need, they don't have the knowledge to do it. I happen to need right now a

one-16th-inch drill bit for a project I'm doing for my daughter. How is the central planner to know

that John Cochran needs a one-16th-inch drill bit. Only I know I need that drill bit. I go down to the

grocery store, I mean to the hardware store, I buy my drill bit. That's, that information is the

kind of thing that the planner can never have, and that's why it always falls apart, as well as

the kind of political diversions, the, the crony capitalism that it goes to in the United States,

all the other ways that it goes wrong.