[Gormo]

Humans are generally bad at predicting patterns in long-term and large-scale systems, especially those that emerge from their own micro-level choices and intentions. Large institutions tend to distill complexity into singular, centralized decision points, which means they rely more on more on speculative attempts to predict outcomes as the scale of their operations increases.

The examples of government intervention that you've cited mostly represent situations in which countries that already had more centralized government and broader economic intervention sought to purposefully imitate the industrial development that had emerged mostly organically in England due to its comparative lack of economic interventionism. And those efforts largely consisted of rolling back top-down interventions that had locked economies into increasingly obsolete patterns, and instead purposefully creating conditions for markets to develop.

Smith worrying about concentration of economic power is valid, but ultimately, there's no fundamental difference between governments and commercial corporations in this regard. They're both centralizing institutions operating on essentially equivalent incentive structures, managed by people with the same assumptions and conceits. Centralization itself is the problem, and polarizing around which type of organization we should favor universalizing it's failure modalities across the whole of society is more than a little silly.