Doing industrial policy isn’t the same as doing it well. It’s like venture capital: very hard to pick winners profitably.

By contrast, getting rid of obsolete regulations costs nothing.
That’s why sunsetting obsolete laws is often much better “industrial policy” than piling yet more responsibility on top of a failed state.

This is why I disagree with @SohrabAhmari here.
The establishment just failed on Iraq, Afghanistan, financial crisis, and coronavirus. It should not be given any more power.
It *is* possible to imagine a competent state, but you’d have to start at the state level within the US.

It is true that one can’t simply abolish the FDA, you need to build something better.
That starts by systematizing existing FDA workarounds — like right-to-try laws, CLIA LDTs, etc — in a parallel regulatory structure.
A state like Texas or a sovereign like Australia could then directly compete with FDA to approve biomedical products.