Comment by coffeemug
4 days ago
The issues with this are precedent/slippery slope. Today it's a small stake in a small number of companies, but empirically government initiatives almost always grow. Once entrenched, I would be willing to bet that the government will take larger and larger stakes in a bigger and bigger number of companies until this model becomes a non-trivial, potentially dominant, share of the economy. I can see myself becoming a single-issue voter to oppose that future (although given bipartisan support I'm unlikely to have any options; maybe Rand Paul).
Anything is a slippery slope if you resign to it. It's not like governments have never been willing (or forced) to privatize or reduce their roles in markets. We are exchanging ideas on a government initiative
Not anything. There are domains where precedents empirically don’t balloon and domains where they do. Federal government is nearly always the latter.
Yeah, this is how you get an oligarch system.