Comment by notepad0x90

Comment by notepad0x90 a day ago

I despite/abhor this administration and their politics, but this is a good move.

There should be more privatization where national interests are involved.

Instead of the ACA for example,the government could have taken a 51% stake in health insurers (forget subsidizing them, own them!) and we the voters would elect politicians to oversee health insurance instead of hoping and trusting CEOs.

So many problems are caused by companies chasing short-term shareholder satisfaction. If the government is a significant shareholder, then guess who they'll try to make happy?

The sheer threat of the government buying a controlling interest and running your company might make some companies behave in the interests of the public more. Especially, if the government is also engaging in policy to harm the company's revenue before buying stakes in it.

I'm not saying the US should be a full-on communist or socialist economy, nothing like that. This is capitalism. We the people get to use or tax dollars to our benefit. Think about it, the US sells bonds right? what if it paid for them by investing in company stocks and derivatives? that's revenue right?

The whole pearl-clutching over ideological extremes doesn't serve the public or the economy's interest.

Some privatization is good, none is great if everyone was decent and honorable. but in this society, moderate privatization where there is potential benefit to the public and national security makes sense.

Companies with government investment should also be prohibited from making political donations, so any company that is trying to sway elections faces the threat of the next administration buying stakes in them to prevent that behavior.

This could be the missing 5th estate that can make democracy last.

wedn3sday a day ago

I swear Im not trying to be glib or dismissive, but I honestly think you dont know what "privatization" means, this is the exact opposite.

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foobarian a day ago

Maybe they mean "privately owned by the government". Which I guess is usually called nationalization

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tyg13 a day ago

Exactly. This amounts to a partial nationalization of Intel.

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notepad0x90 a day ago

No offense taken, my understanding of the term could was wrong. I hope it doesn't take anything away from my argument though. I think I wanted to use the term "deprivatization" instead, I only remember this topic distantly from reading about communism and economics.

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ecocentrik a day ago

I agree. He should take control of Tesla, OpenAI, Palantir and Facebook next. Then privatize some of the leading quantum computing companies. Why do we even need venture capital if we can just build out an Office of Strategic Investment and control everything from the federal government. \s

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poslathian a day ago

It’s super debatable whether or not DARPA has done more for creating enterprise value in the US tech sector than sand hill.
At the least, without darpa the whole Bay Area machine would not exist today, so it’s at least necessary if not sufficient.
Not just darpa but nih, nsf, doe, onr, arl, nasa, and the national labs are definitively necessary causal dependencies on of every company and industry driving US national pride and all of the most valuable companies.
Even if the firm never takes a grant, their talent, supply chain, and component pipelines all depend on these grantor agencies thoughtfully allocating taxpayer capital at the national level.

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notepad0x90 a day ago

Slippery-slope fallacy. The money to buy shares has to come from somewhere and the power of the purse is with House of reps. Someone like Trump can (and is-per this post) take stakes in random companies, but that's our democracy. You wouldn't say "bomb canada, france, england and norway" because the military bombed one country right? You make sure congress checks and balances that power.
If the government takes over those companies and they don't do well, it means lost jobs which means lost elections too. There's a risk calculus to be had.
The current policy of never intervening or taking ownership in companies.. unless they are "too big to fail and start failing" only benefits the companies.

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- ecocentrik a day ago
  
  No, that was sarcasm that employed a slippery slope argument. I was not seriously suggesting that the federal government will buy Facebook. I was suggesting that we should avoid a pattern of behavior (slippery slope) that might lead to the socialization of other companies. Giving Intel a grant to keep it from failing is very different from demanding 10% in exchange for funds to keep it from failing.
  
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