Uncle Sam shouldn't own Intel stock

Other examples:

> Since the 1950s, the federal government has stepped in as a backstop for railroads, farm credit, airlines (twice), automotive companies, savings and loan companies, banks, and farmers.

Every situation has its own idiosyncrasies, but in each, the federal government intervened to stabilize a critical industry, avoiding systemic collapse that surely would have left the average taxpayer much worse off. In some instances, the treasury guaranteed loans, meaning that creditors would not suffer if the relevant industry could not generate sufficient revenue to pay back the loans, leading to less onerous interest rates.

A second option was that the government would provide loans at relatively low interest rates to ensure that industries remained solvent.

In a third option, the United States Treasury would take an ownership stake in some of these companies in what amounts to an “at-the-market” offering, in which the companies involved issue more shares at their current market price to the government in exchange for cash to continue business operations.

https://chicagopolicyreview.org/2022/08/23/piece-of-the-acti...

  > could not generate sufficient revenue to pay back the loans

Governments aren't people. If I gift you money, that money doesn't come back to me. But if a government gifts someone money, it makes its way back. As long as that money gets spent, there's returns. Even if you die, and even if you don't have that $14m for the death tax, that money still pays dividends back.

The only way it doesn't is if the economy crumbles or that money is taken out of the entire economy (which is much harder to do considering the dollar being the current global currency). So basically you need to light it on fire.

You can do things to slow that flow but it does come back. A low interest loan is just increasing that flow and this is why a negative interest rate can still generate a return. A company can fail and there'd still be returns through taxes in the mean time. The money doesn't just evaporate.

I think a lot conversations about money get weird because we over generalize what money means, applying money's context for an average person more broadly. But money has a very different context when you're talking about governments, corporations, or even billionaires (due to the shear amount). Nor are those examples the same either.

In this case I think it matters. The government already has a stake in Intel, and in all companies. Shares only decrease the pie available to the public while increases the ability for government official to do insider trading and increases nationalization.