Comment by iamnothere
4 days ago
Exactly, few would oppose a stake in rare earths mining or something, but the more likely endgame of this is a government stake in companies like Google and Palantir. Which will inevitably lead to even more influence and “special access” privileges.
Edit: others have pointed out that the government likely already had investments in most of these tech firms through In-Q-Tel, which is also a potential issue, but that’s funding for small growing companies. It’s another matter entirely when government owns a percentage of our mature technology infrastructure.
I'm against the government having stake in any private company. It incentivizes the wrong behaviors. Regulations need to be written by a neutral party. Policy decisions need to be fair and balanced between the players in the market, not favoring one that they "own".
Right, it should simply compete on the open market with zero-margin public companies. A very straightforward way to incentivize efficient markets when other mechanisms fail. Not every industry and certainly not every process benefits from innovation—schumpeter, the father of the modern vc industry, was very emphatic about this.
There are many issues to have with this too, of course—the devil is in the details. If we implemented it today this process would look like paying five guys billions of dollars to pay northrup grumman slightly less to subcontract producing basic products to firms overseas anyway
I agree with you that it’s a bad idea, I just don’t think there are many in the US right now who care. And I myself have to grudgingly accept that industrial policy is probably going to happen in areas like strategic resources, even if I don’t like it. I just think it has to stop at a very low level, or you quickly end up with the government owning 25% of Blackrock in order to prop up the market.
Do I think we have that kind of restraint? No. It’s probably going to end up this way. Our future is all the bad parts of China without any of the good.