Comment by 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
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.
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.
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.