“Get your ass to Pittsburgh,” barked the man whose hand was on one of the many money spigots that are irrigating the Biden administration’s industrial policy. The barker, as reported by the Wall Street Journal, was Jigar Shah, head of the Energy Department’s Loan Programs Office — whose lending capacity has been increased 10-fold, to $400 billion, by Congress. The person on the other end of the phone call, a business executive, obediently met Shah at a clean energy conference in Pittsburgh, and five months later had a $375 million LPO loan. Ford and its battery manufacturing partner have received from the LPO $9.2 billion that, presumably, private capital markets would not provide. If that is true, why is it true?

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