Some dumb ideas just never seem to die

In a scene of the gangster movie, Mike Newell's Donnie Brasco, an ageing Mafioso named Lefty Ruggiero paces a hospital corridor while his son fights for his life following a drug overdose.

- Bret Stephens

“Twenty-eight years, you can read it on his birth certificate: Bellevue Hospital” Lefty, played by Al Pacino, tells Donnie, played by Johnny Depp, about his comatose son. “Now he's back, in there, and I’m out here, worried to my death. And he’s asleep in there, same as 28 years ago, with the same expression. He's made no progress.’ It's a line that could apply just as well to America’s policy debates.

Twenty-eight years ago — that was 1997, when Donnie Brasco came out — we thought we had made progress.

Trade protectionism? The Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act and beggar-thy-neighbour policies of the 1930s showed us the worldwide economic ruin to which that could lead. Government stakes in private enterprise, like the Trump administration’s recent equity stake in Intel? The record of state investment in, or control of, private enterprises, from Solyndra to Sematech, is mostly a story of financial disappointment, taxpayer bailouts, managerial incompetence, political interference, and cronyism.

America first? The slogan of pre-World War Ilisolationists should have been buried forever on Dec 7, 1941. Instead, it emerged from its grave some 75 years later. But it isn’t just the Trump administration that is reawakening the moral and intellectual zombies of the past. Everywhere one looks, there are policy necromancers.