Should a state government that can’t balance its own books play venture capitalist, scouring the business world in search of the next big thing?

That’s the most important question to emerge in the wake of the Evergreen Solar meltdown. It is a fiasco that saw the Patrick administration lure a seemingly hot company to Massachusetts with tens of millions in state tax deals, only to see its prize catch stun everyone by announcing it would shutter its new Devens plant, lay off hundreds of workers and expand in China.

In fact, maybe it’s time to take it a step further and look more closely at the Bay State’s steadily expanding venture into state capitalism. For it stretches far beyond Evergreen to include a $1 billion life sciences kitty and a couple of former military bases being retooled as giant development land banks.

If you think “entrepreneurial government” is an oxymoron, well then Evergreen should be a big wakeup call.

Rep. Bradley Jones of Reading, the leader of Beacon Hill’s small but growing band of Republicans, can take credit for asking the right question at the right time.

“Should we be using tax credits to pick winners and losers?” Jones asked in a recent NECN interview. “Or should we be trying to create a broader-based positive environment for all businesses, and then let the marketplace determine which ones are going to thrive?”

Playing Quarterback

In all fairness, there’s lots of blame to go around here on both sides of the political aisle.

We’ve had years of steadily growing efforts by various Massachusetts governors and legislative leaders to try and “grow jobs” and spur hiring through tax breaks and land deals galore. This has been a game that governors of both parties have played at, Mitt Romney and Deval Patrick alike.

But no one has bothered to ask if this is really the right approach – as in, should the governor and Legislature really be trying to quarterback our economy, setting up expansion zones and making calls on which companies are promising and which are duds?

In fact, the only real debate has been an internal Democratic Party affair between old-style State House liberals who don’t like what they see as corporate freebies and centrists who contend it’s the price of luring high-paying jobs.

In part, that’s because, until its modest comeback in the last election, the state Republican Party – a party that over the generations produced leaders of the caliber of Charles Sumner and Henry Cabot Lodge – had let itself slide from minority to fringe status.

With Republicans at least regaining their voice on Beacon Hill, maybe it’s time to shift the premise of the debate. It should be not whether state government should try to do something to boost the local economy, but just what that something is.

You don’t have to be a Tea Party disciple to question whether government bureaucrats are the right ones to determine whether a complex biotech or tech company has what it takes to survive and thrive. Frankly, most laypeople would have a hard enough time trying to figure out what some of these companies actually do.

In fact, there are a whole bunch of local venture capital firms, their partners making untold millions, doing this work. And even then, their track record has its share of painful misses – Facebook billionaire Mark Zuckerberg struck out with a local venture capital firm before he headed out to the Silicon Valley and found the cash he needed to turn the social world upside down.

Driving Blind

And when state officials are not doubling as venture capitalists, they are playing at real estate developer, with mixed results.

When the military decided to shut down Fort Devens and the South Weymouth Naval Air Station, it certainly sounded like a bright idea to convert the sprawling bases into commercial meccas. Quasi-independent government agencies would play developer, cutting deals and recruiting companies.

But Evergreen’s implosion – the company built a plant for 800 workers at Devens with help from its big state subsidy – at least raises some questions about this strategy. It follows on the heels of Gillette’s shutdown of a warehouse complex.

Things in South Weymouth, despite years of debate and haggling, haven’t even gotten that far, with most of the property undeveloped and the U.S. Navy still in ultimate control.

The alternative, though, is not to do anything. Rather, maybe all this money and energy would be better spent leveling the playing field for all businesses. That means more than just lowering taxes – chronically high housing prices and electricity bills are arguably even bigger obstacles to expansion here in Massachusetts.

One common problem with these various state capitalism schemes is that it puts the wrong people in the driver’s seat, with government bureaucrats picking locations and making decisions on winning technologies.

Success or failure of any individual business endeavor is a complex thing, one that is hard for any outsider to fully grasp, even a theoretically well-trained loan officer or venture capitalist.

The workings of a complex modern economy can be as complex and whimsical as human nature. Economists may want to think of their field as a science, but there is a lot more art to it than they might want to acknowledge.

I’ve spent 15 years reporting on everything from the business side of sports to casinos and subprime mortgage lenders, and here’s what I’ve learned: Beyond a few general precepts, I don’t really have a clue on what really makes capitalism go – other than it just does.

But that may be a whole lot more than our jobs-hungry state government, which thinks it knows everything about business, but seemingly understands dangerously little.