(FORTUNE Magazine) – Across the land, up hill and down dale, the people are coming out for industrial policy. As previously and derisively noted in this space, Paul Tsongas is for it. Ross Perot seems to be for it. (He says his administration would work closely with different industries, to make sure that each was on the right track.) Washington Post economic pundit Hobart Rowen is definitely for it. Business Week and the New York Times are naturally for it. Senator Donald W. Riegle Jr. of Michigan defends it at every opportunity. Economist Robert R. Reich of Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government is for it and furthermore states: ''Industrial policy is back, far more respectable than it was before.'' Fred Bergsten of the Institute for International Economics, who used to be against it, is now for it. Rand V. Araskog, CEO of ITT, is for it. Veep Dan Quayle, chairman of the President's Council on Competitiveness, is against it but this will get him nowhere, as the whole wide world is now busy mixing up his organization and the Competitiveness Policy Council -- jointly created by the President and Congress -- which is definitely all for it. An interesting question about industrial policy is: What the hell is it? In search of an answer, we have extensively browsed through the 833 documents served up by Nexis when asked for all 1992 citations invoking the fateful phrase, and have come away thinking it has several meanings. Sometimes it refers merely to government support of basic research. Sometimes it refers to any government programs that affect the economy. People using the term in this sense almost invariably proceed to argue that since we already have an industrial policy, why not make it explicit? That sounds reasonable enough, except that the explicit version they have in mind usually turns out to be synonymous with ''government economic planning.'' Its operational imperative is for the government to intervene in markets so as to make sure that capital flows in the right direction -- to the shale oil industry, for example. Yes, ma'am, we were being sarcastic there, but there are lots of other examples of government guessing wrong when it decides who deserves to win and to lose. A particular favorite is the passage in Business Week, where they get to arguing that industrial policy is an old American tradition, then cite such examples as government aid to the railroads in the 19th century and tax breaks for the real estate industry in the 1980s. Prudently not mentioned in this analysis is the subsequent nationwide collapse of real estate markets done in by massive overbuilding at least partially attributable to tax breaks. Many of those blowing smoke for industrial policy begin with invocations of the wily Nipponese, said to have benefited enormously from their own government's interventions. But as FORTUNE mentioned last fortnight, Japanese TV manufacturers, who were pushed by the government to pioneer in high- definition television (HDTV), have ended up with a technology that is obsolete even as it is introduced. It is already being leapfrogged by a digital advanced television (DATV), developed by unguided American capitalists, that will enable you to watch a baseball game from any angle you wish; you can even see the whole game from the perspective of the baseball itself. Neat, eh? It is plainly true, as Professor Reich says, that industrial policy has suddenly become respectable. But why? In the Reagan years, the idea had only a few supporters, mostly dirigiste Democrats. The Carter Administration itself had resoundingly turned against industrial policy in its last year or so. The final report of Carter's Council of Economic Advisers (led by Charles L. Schultze) firmly states: ''It is presumptuous to assume that successful identification of winning and losing industrial sectors is possible.'' Has anything made it less presumptuous since then? Certainly not. But maybe we have more presumptuous people around these days.