OK\u2014who\u2019s the dangerous radical pushing the state to take over private enterprise here? Who\u2019s aping the Chinese Communist policy of having the government own or control major business entities?<\/p>\n
Zohran Mamdani? He\u2019s called for more consumer-friendly regulation of some New York City markets (rental housing in particular), and proposed setting up a handful of city-run grocery stores, but he hasn\u2019t advocated seizing big corporations or banks, though New York is lousy with them.<\/p>\n
On the other hand, there\u2019s Donald Trump. His approval of Nippon Steel\u2019s purchase of U.S. Steel was conditioned on giving the government a golden share through which the government\u2014that is, Trump\u2014could control the company\u2019s policies and conduct. His decision to let chipmakers Nvidia and AMD sell their H20 chips to China, despite the risks that poses to U.S. national security, was conditioned on their having to pay our government 15 percent of the revenues they made from those sales, as my colleague David Dayen has noted<\/a>. He has told Intel to fire its CEO, then walked that back when the CEO visited the White House<\/a> and apparently promised, said Trump, to \u201cbring suggestions to me.\u201d On Friday, The Wall Street Journal reported<\/a> that Trump was now considering having the government take a financial stake in the company. And he\u2019s also been strong-arming major law firms to work pro bono for causes he promotes.<\/p>\n More from Harold Meyerson<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n To be sure, there have been times in our history when the government has involved itself directly in businesses\u2019 affairs and taken temporary stakes in them, but until now, that\u2019s always been during particular and time-limited emergencies. When the domestic auto industry faced the prospect of collapse in the wake of the 2008 financial crash, the government took a temporary stake in both General Motors and Chrysler in return for bailing them out. While also bailing out the largest banks, however, it did not take a stake in them. And while the Biden administration boosted the strategically important green-energy industry with tax credits, it took no stake in those companies.<\/p>\n The Biden initiatives were classic industrial policy\u2014but they didn\u2019t encompass government control or even involvement in individual companies\u2019 conduct. If they had, they would have crossed the line into state capitalism, which is the system that prevails in our rival for global domination\u2014the People\u2019s Republic of China. China has a market economy that the state directs through its de jure or de facto control of the majority of major enterprises. Its version of state capitalism is Leninist capitalism, in which it\u2019s the leaders of the Communist Party who control the state\u2019s ownership of large businesses.<\/p>\n Our version of state capitalism is Trumpian capitalism, which, like Chinese state capitalism, involves the government\u2019s increasing control and direction of businesses. As The Wall Street Journal\u2019s chief business columnist, Greg Ip, has observed<\/a>, under Trump \u201ccapitalism in America is starting to look like China.\u201d Americans\u2019 support for \u201cfree-market\u201d capitalism, Ip continues, has weakened as a result of decades of offshoring (and partly in consequence, if I may go beyond Ip, of working-class downward mobility). The market\u2019s inability to meet or even address the nation\u2019s strategic needs and its citizens\u2019 aspirations was the proximate cause of Biden\u2019s industrial policy.<\/p>\n But, as Ip makes clear, Biden\u2019s industrial policy wasn\u2019t state capitalism in the mode of China. It\u2019s Trump who\u2019s crossed that line, with his takeover and bullying of corporations, banks, and law firms.<\/p>\n It\u2019s impossible to imagine Trump, or Republicans generally, supporting any form of state capitalism, however, if it occurred under anyone else\u2019s presidency. It\u2019s happened under Trump because, like Louis XIV, Trump adheres to the doctrine \u201cL\u2019\u00e9tat c\u2019est moi\u201d\u2014I am the state. Under his rule, the state has become primarily the vehicle through which he can maximize his personal control of whatever he wishes to control. No broader doctrine\u2014not nationalism, not mercantilism, not liberalism\u2019s preference for regulated capitalism or a mixed economy, and certainly not social democracy or any form of socialism\u2014is at the root of Trump\u2019s embrace of state capitalism.<\/p>\n If there\u2019s an \u201cism\u201d here, it\u2019s a narcissism rooted in an insecure man\u2019s overwhelming urge for self-aggrandizement, for structuring transactions so that he visibly profits at somebody else\u2019s expense. That profit doesn\u2019t have to be financial; what really matters is that he takes control of something\u2014a business, the trade balance of other nations, a state, a city, a university, one of the other branches of the federal government, or smaller stuff like the Kennedy Center\u2014that had been under the control of somebody else.<\/p>\n Of course, that profit can be financial as well. In authorizing Nvidia to sell chips to China, Trump stands to make serious money. His latest filing with the U.S. Office of Government Ethics shows<\/a> that he owned between $615,000 and $1.3 million in Nvidia shares late last year. Unlike the other presidents of the past half-century, Trump has not put his assets in a blind trust or Treasury bonds, and has rejected calls to divest himself of stocks.<\/p>\n