Trump’s Intel deal breaks the mold, and builds his wealth dream
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.
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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.
Countries rich in natural resources, particularly oil, have long used sovereign wealth funds to diversify and grow their economies.
Petroleum-rich nations like Norway and Saudi Arabia channel some of their oil revenue into sovereign wealth funds, which then — much like, say, multibillion-dollar university endowments in America — can produce enormous returns.
Norway pays for up to 25% of its welfare state with the Government Pension Fund for Norway, which holds more than $1.7 trillion in assets.
Is it a bad thing to pay for government functions with market profits, rather than by raising taxes on citizens or selling more debt that has to be repaid with interest?
A nation pays interest on its national debt — but it earns interest and other returns from a sovereign wealth fund.
Mainstream conservatives more than 10 years ago got behind a plan with many of the same advantages and disadvantages of a sovereign wealth fund: “privatizing” Social Security.
The idea then was to allow Americans to put their compulsory Social Security payments into government-approved funds of their own choosing, which would generate higher returns from market investments than the Social Security Trust Fund could get investing exclusively in US Treasury securities.
Up to now, conservatives embraced that policy as a good free-market idea.
Is a sovereign wealth fund any different?
They both carry the same risks — above all what economists call “moral hazard.”
The country got a taste of that in the Great Recession, when financial institutions that bankrupted themselves with bad investments were deemed “too big to fail” and were bailed out by Washington.
The government can’t allow Social Security to go bust, and if the retirement system’s money is invested in private funds, how many of those could Washington allow to fail, even if they made lousy investments?
And Trump is taking a double risk: Most sovereign wealth funds only aim to maximize returns, producing revenue for the government.
Trump, however, also wants to conduct industrial policy with a sovereign wealth fund, by buying stakes in strategically important but economically troubled companies like Intel.
Yet the question isn’t just whether America can do a sovereign wealth fund right — it’s also what happens if we do nothing and other countries perfect the strategy.
Beijing has the $1.3 trillion China Investment Corp., plus Hong Kong’s $1 trillion SAFE Investment Co., and smaller funds with billions in assets.
During the Cold War, when America was facing an international Communist threat sponsored by the Soviet Union, conservatives knew that absolute devotion to free-market principles was self-defeating.
William F. Buckley Jr., just coming into his own as a conservative leader in 1952, was staunchly committed to capitalism and small government.
Nevertheless, he wrote: “Conservatives, and many Republicans, have got to think this problem through. And if they deem Soviet power a menace to our freedom (as I happen to), they will have to support large armies and air forces, atomic energy, central intelligence, war production boards and the attendant centralization of power in Washington.”
Trump is thinking through the problem of our time, and the need for a sovereign wealth fund to meet it.
Daniel McCarthy is the editor of Modern Age: A Conservative Review and editor-at-large of The American Conservative.
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