1) not the point, that list of criticisms was a bad list of criticisms

2) whether anything that happened in the last month is going to promote more domestic manifacturing is quite dubious at best.

As a quick excercise:

- for almost every industry new factories would be needed to significantly increase domestic production

- you are disencintivized to mix foreign and domestic materials if you plan to export (as you are going to pay potentially double tariffs)

- most things (especially cars) have long supply chains

- building a factory takes both non-trivial investment and at least a few months

And you get that for many products it would take sorta

    lenght_of_supply_chain * (few_months + gathering_fund_permits_time)

All this to still get quite a few counter tariffs on exports.

>1) not the point, that list of criticisms was a bad list of criticisms

My claim was merely that the situation was analogous. So yes, it is the point, in my view.

There is a grey area where you can do things that the electorate may want, which also happen to benefit your cronies. This overall issue is more severe for big government types, since more largesse is getting handed out.

I'd additionally highlight your use of the term "relevant electorate". Which underscores that "cronies" and "voters" may be the same people.

Direct Tesla subsidies would probably be quite popular with Tesla workers. That's a relevant electorate. Would that therefore make direct Tesla subsidies defensible? That's what your argument seems to imply.

>2) whether anything that happened in the last month is going to promote more domestic manifacturing is quite dubious at best.

I suspect some of the items from the FEE list won't be particularly effective at their stated goal either. In general, people will disagree about the likely effectiveness of government programs. So I'm not sure "likely effectiveness" is a great way to check for favoritism.