President Trump is thinking way outside the box, forming a national fund that could pay for government functions with market profits, rather than higher taxes.
Is it Comrade President now?
Some conservatives are up in arms about President Donald Trump’s decision to have the government buy shares in Intel.
That’s state ownership of the means of production, isn’t it? Classic, textbook socialism.
“If there is anyone who was a halfway prominent mainstream conservative . . . 10 years ago who now tells me they wouldn’t have screamed about incipient ‘socialism!’ or ‘fascism!’ about Trump’s Intel ‘investment’,” writes Jonah Goldberg on X, “I presumptively assume they are lying.”
In fact, a whole school of thought on the right, going back decades, has championed industrial policies as bold as Trump’s, if not bolder.
The public face of that school of thought was Pat Buchanan, who was way ahead of the national debate on industrial and trade policy just as he was on immigration.
Trump is not a socialist, and America has a long history of government owning companies — Amtrak is a familiar example.
The for-profit but government-owned passenger-rail company was created by the Republican administration of Richard Nixon.
What Trump is doing with Intel is different, however.
Trump sees the Intel deal as a first step toward creating an American “sovereign wealth fund,” with many more investments to follow.
The president isn’t looking to the past — this is about keeping the United States competitive with other nations in the 21st century, including Communist China, which controls the world’s second- and third-largest sovereign wealth funds.
A sovereign wealth fund, much like a private investment fund, contains stocks, bonds and other assets expected to appreciate in value.
