I'm sorry...I'm missing the point.

Yes, you are, and I have to add "tsk tsk, you of all people".

If permanent restructuring of the economy by the government is bad by Smithian definition, then a temporary restructuring is the lesser evil. If it's too late to keep the government from intervening in the economy, then the less it intervenes the better.

Isn't the idea that the economy should be able to run free and "naturally" determine its own outcome*?. A one-time poke might push it in a desired direction, but thereafter the economy will seek its own new equilibrium, one that's a better fit for the new conditions of the system; in contrast, a permanent restructuring tries to lock the economy into an artificial equilibrium, one that may not be viable. In the former one-shot case, market forces can finetune the result; in the latter case, the result might be completely disastrous by fiat and can only be fixed by yet another intervention.

--Robert

(*--A large subject worthy of its own thread is the proposition that Adam Smith himself killed the free market when he revealed the Invisible Hand. He put the conceptual tools in the hands of the participants that allow them to manipulate the market and defeat it. This propositiion is self-evidently true--market manipulation is such a fundamental of business today, in marketing and strategic alliances and manipulation of supplies to maintain price and endless extensions of patent and copyright terms to maintain monopolies, ad nauseum, that people aren't generally conscious of the fact that they're "misbehaving" in classic Smithian terms.)