New Frontiers in MAGA Socialism

The MAGA Socialists are expanding attempting to expand their tentacles into the manufacturing sector.

Not content with embracing Agrarian Socialism, MAGA is now looking at expanding their socialist claws into the manufacturing sector:

President Trump's team is weighing a plan to spur the construction of factories and other infrastructure in a bid to jump-start the U.S.'s manufacturing sector, according to documents and people familiar with the discussions.

Under the plan, the administration would use money from a $550 billion investment fund established as part of trade negotiations with Japan to invest in the development of semiconductors, pharmaceuticals, critical minerals, energy, ships and quantum computing.

Some of the projects would be granted preferential treatment from the government, including expedited regulatory review. The administration is considering granting leases to companies that would give them access to federal land and water, according to the people and documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

The plan would mark a new frontier in Trump's efforts to exert influence over the private sector, giving the government a central role in the reshaping of U.S. manufacturing. It comes as the president has secured a government stake in Intel, negotiated a "golden share" in U.S. Steel and persuaded chip companies to give the U.S. a cut of certain sales to China.

Not content with the Golden Share, Trump is now working to embed the federal government into picking more winners and losers among the manufacturing sector get the tentacles of the government even more into the American economy. Because as we know…

If successful, the proposed plan could help the president deliver on his campaign promises. It would also give Trump control over which industries get the benefit of government assistance.

Sure, it may sound, at first glance, like a patriotic effort to restore American industry and evoke nostalgia for an earlier era when “Made in America” was a badge of economic dominance. Yet peel back the rhetoric, and this plan is nothing less than an exercise in state control, corporate favoritism, and economic distortion. Far from representing American capitalism, it embodies its opposite: government-directed industrial policy, financed through international political bargaining, with winners and losers chosen not by consumers in the marketplace but by bureaucrats in Washington.

This is of course bad policy, bad politics, and bad economics, and the antithesis of the free-market capitalism that Made America Great.