Imagine my shock to, gulp, agree with Sarah Palin on anything at all. But the one-time vice presidential candidate is absolutely right to call Donald Trump bribing Carrier to keep jobs in the U.S. "crony capitalism."

Asia is Exhibit A as to why. The president-elect's stunt won the news cycle, and that was the point. In saving 1,000 Indiana jobs (for now, at least), Trump got more credit and hype than President Barrack Obama did for creating 16 million since 2009. But Trump's methods — and the $7 million price — came right out of the playbooks of China, Japan and Indonesia and set American capitalism back in ways Republicans refuse to admit. It's also a reminder that Team Trump learned the wrong lessons from Asia these last 20 years.

Saving Carrier: You'd think Japan alone would have settled this one for a self-described "great" businessman. Tokyo's bureaucrats have long blurred the lines between public and private sectors, believing that the broader national good outweighed the economic imperatives of companies. Saving a pile of jobs over here is great politics, but it doesn't fix the pile of headwinds undermining them over there. Tossing money at Carrier won't make U.S. labor more productive, only sage policymaking and training can do that. Palin is right to worry that "picking and choosing" which companies receive "corporate welfare" is a "hallmark of corruption" and, ultimately, "socialism." Lawrence Summers, the former U.S. Treasury secretary, argues that using the "state's monopoly" on corporate interests like this "is the world of New York City under Tammany Hall, of Suharto's Indonesia, and of Putin's Russia." He writes in The Washington Post that "like Hong Kong, as mainland China increasingly imposes its will, we may have taken a first step toward a kind of reverse transition from rule of law capitalism to ad hoc deal-based capitalism." Asia offers ample evidence the large tariffs on struggling companies and tossing largess at executives is a recipe for economic malaise.