We used to call this an "Industrial policy" or an "Economic development policy". Back in the golden era when a strong labor movement coexisted with a Red Scare. 78 years after Taft-Hartley and 44 years since PATCO, not so much.
We have maybe fifty or a hundred million people rotting away in areas where jobs are scarce and housing is plentiful, because we used government policy to shut them out of areas where jobs are plentiful and housing is scarce. We systematically exported jobs from places that aren't big cities because they can be performed overseas and our aristocracy can still profit from them by owning those people overseas.
I don't know if returning to a little more deliberate of an economy is even a partial salve for the place we've found ourselves, but I don't think this laissez faire thing is sustainable for a whole lot longer. We are overleveraged, and arrogantly delusional about our sway at the moment; "Ownership" is not some valuable skill. The fall of an anchor currency and global conversion to an alternate financial network would be a spectacular thing, an astroid striking terrain, which might leave craters on entire other continents from secondary ejecta. World wars have been fought over less.
"We" wasn't big government. It was a million homeowners who decided that the neighborhood they moved into should be frozen in amber forever. Everyone wants housing to be cheap but also for their property values to rise onto infinity. They push back against any attempt to change this and then complain about the inevitable results.
