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Stupid government scope creep is fine when my favorite team does it!
I think if you're pro Trump doing this you also need to consider you're implicitly pro Kamala doing this, do you think that sounds good?
Because in 4-8 years the blue tribe might start doing it too, and this is a silly road to go down.
It's definitely a move away from New England Finance's control over the party
Profoundly, this is a risk for every government in perpetuity
Yes, I'm not sure but I have serious doubts as to their ability to make better choices than businesses now. If they could, planned economies would have a way better track record than they do.
Yes.
I can kind of think of a Steelman here where government shareholdings in major national champions could enhance corporate governance and specifically help align business and government interests over the long term, but I give this roughly a 0% chance of happening with the current status of western governance institutional skill.
Feels like everyone in the political class finally woke up to China's industrial results and going "oh fuck maybe there was something to be said for this" and are now trying to cargo-cult-government to replicate.
My rules > your rules, fairly > your rules, unfairly.
"My rules" would be no government control of companies. "Your rules, fairly" would be that all political sides get to have the government control companies. "Your rules, unfairly" means that only the left gets to do it.
The answer to this is the same as the answer to a lot of similar things: The left broke the norms so much that the only choices are to do so equally or to do so only for the left. And doing it equally is better. The option of not doing it at all would be the best, but the left has foreclosed that option.
When have the Democrats nationalized a private company?
Consider also that this is simply retarded. It's not Trump or Republicans who will own $INTC, it's the United States Government, and so in 3.5 years it'll likely be handed to "Democrats".
I would not call this nationalizing Intel (etc.)
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My rules are also "no government control of companies."
I'm pretty equitable, I think the motivations and intellectual caliber of both the left and right are stupid as fuck. Americans are of course, as with many things, at the cutting edge of this trend.
I find your response quite fascinating. It strikes me that both American parties in a multi-turn prisoners dilemma game where the payoff for "defect" is a temporary gain in political power, which is then offset by the other side doing the same thing, and american governance/institutions/leadership being overall degraded as a result. Both sides are so myopic they seem to only have the capacity to smash the "defect" button over and over again, as American institutions rot, economic and military dominance over the world wanes, and the government gets worse and worse at doing... anything.
And your response to this is "yes! Smash the defect button before they do! Smash it!!!"
I know you don't want to be the first one to cooperate while the other side defects and gets a leg up, but damn, you must all realize this isn't going to end well for your children right?
Smashing the defect button in response to someone who always defects is the correct move.
This statement is wrong in the general case on game theoretic grounds. Not everything is a prisoners dilemma, and not everything your opponent does that you don't like is a game-theory defection. In this case, if you believe that government intervention in the market is bad, then cons are just doing a harm and not disincentivising future similar actions by liberals.
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Kind of?
Until you're both way worse off at the end of it all. Although I guess you're both worse off together.
Would much prefer an unwinding of the political cold war and a commitment towards shared prosperity (as that's worked quite well for the last 10,000 years) but that brings us back to "the current crop of western political leaders are myopic morons"
And exactly how are you going to do that?
By forming an orthogonal coalition with other people willing to press the "cooperate" button. "Orthogonal" meaning you cluster around a set of self-consistent values that are split between the current political coalitions. For example, if I had the charisma and moral fortitude, I'd try and pull together a movement that concedes to the left-wing economics of the liberation theology catholics but promotes the right-wing moral culture of the tradcaths. We'd advocate something like an open-borders welfare state, but with brutal enforcement of moral orthodoxy to discourage leeches from coming here. (I'm a morally spineless neoliberal currently, but compromise means being willing to give stuff up.)
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Genuinely I have no idea
I'm willing to be the first to cooperate vs defect as I believe in the power of human win/win coordination
But I am a single human with 0 political power
Honestly I'm mildly a doomer about all of this, I just refuse to say "fuck it" and embrace the zero sum game
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This implies that the right wing and left wing argument about state control are entirely about morals and not about the effectiveness of capitalism, free markets and a hands-off government.
If "your rules fairly" includes doing things that you think are stupid, inefficient, counter-productive and extra prone to corruption (as the traditional small government conservative would think of governments owning companies) then doing it back would be nonsensical.
It only makes sense in a situation where the main argument to not do something is because of morals or tradition or law, rather than it being bad policy. Why hit our country in the face just because the left hits our country in the face sometimes? You just help to normalize and move the overton window on counterproductive self-face hitting among normies.
Just like you can't get back to the state of "nobody does it", you also can't get back to the state of "it isn't in the Overton window". Either it's acceptable for only the left to do it, or it's acceptable for both sides. You can't move the Overton window to "it's acceptable for nobody".
There are a great many situations where your statement would be obviously untrue. Should cons start getting abortions to own the libs?
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If you believe that state ownership of private enterprise is a good thing for the nation then you don't need to talk about "the other side" to begin with, you can justify it off the merits of state ownership.
If you don't believe it's a good thing for the nation, then why would you want the country to harm itself?
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Thank you so much for putting this into words better than I could
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Trump doing this doesn't make the Dems more likely to do it. They've already thought of ways to do this on their own (e.g. the government held over 60% of GM as part of Obama's plan in the aftermath of the GFC) anyway. The danger is more that if it appears to succeed (i.e. Intel both does well in the short term and builds more advanced fabs in the US) that a future Republican administration will do more of the same. If, as I think is more likely, it fails (because Intel sucks and this amounts to a further bailout) and future Republicans decide to do more of it anyway, that's mostly on them.
I would posit the GM share ownership was as a result of a huge exigent circumstances, which Intel is not facing.
I also think this makes the Dems more likely to do it, as Trump is moving the Overton window towards doing this whenever you feel like it and towards companies that aren't on the verge of total collapse (although maybe Intel is, lol).
How would you feel if the Dems started buying equity shares in solar panel manufacturers because "the climate is an urgent crisis we must address"?
But overall I am a fan of your comment and mostly agree with you. Thanks for sharing!
They were already facing it; this is a follow on from their taking of CHIPS Act money. Intel is in trouble; x86-based architectures have lost to ARM at the high end, they don't have a GPU design, and their foundries aren't state-of-the-art. They can either try to build down and compete only in markets which don't want the cutting edge (defense, aerospace, automotive), or build up and try to get themselves out of the hole they are in. They probably are simply too big and have too much debt to do the first without bankruptcy, and it's simply not clear how they can do the second.
About the same way I felt about Solyndra. My point isn't that this isn't bad, it's that it's not some new sort of badness.
Fair points!
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That would sound scary, if I didn't see the entire tech and financial sector coordinate to cut off dissident companies way before any of this was ever talked about. If stuff like this is going to happen anyway, I prefer state control to be made explicit, so you know which companies are allied or compromised, depending on the administration.
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