US Intel

The short version is: this can work but it won't.

Let me just say, for those of us who remember the 1990s and 2000s, Intel's drop off has been something nobody would've predicted. It's hard to overstate just how dominant they were (other than the fairly brief but significant Athlon64 era). And even when they were behind on consumer CPUs, which they were until the Core Duo/Centrino platform (which was really the Pentium 3) saved them from the Pentium 4 disaster, their fab ability was second to none.

So what happened? Capitalism happened. More specifically, financialization happened. Everything US companies does comes down to simply cutting costs and increasing profits for short-term financial performance. There is (now) absolutely no long term thinking. CEOs get parachuted in and stay just long enough to collect a huge golden parachute before the merry-go-round continues. And who are approving these massive CEO pay packets? Other CEOs who sit on the board.

We've seen this exact same thing happen with Boeing. The only things holding Boeing together are the inertia from earlier successes, the 737 type rating monopoly for budget airlines and defense contracting. Just look at the Starliner project to see Boeing actually try to build anything.

An example of this financialization is the likes of Dell, Gateway, IBM, HP, Compaq, etc all started to cut costs by offshoring parts of their operations to Taiwan. At first it was just assembly and then it was certain parts (eg motherboards) and at some point they had completely funded the Taiwan PC industry and created Asus, Acer, MSI, etc. US computer manufacturers completely paid for the Taiwan PC industry by short-term profit seeking.

There are multiple ways to describe China's economy but the most accurate and relevant for this topic is that it's a command economy and the coming years will show just how much more devastatingly effective this will be. Really the only thing stopping Chinese companies from destroying Western competitors is trade barriers (eg BYD).

So I think the US government should take equity interests in companies they bail out rather than just giving them gifts or even loans. The government should (IMHO) also take equity stakes in any extraction companies (eg oil and gas). China shows this can work.

So why won't it work here? Because the administration is both corrupt and incompetent. Everything done by the administration is to line the pockets of politicians and the wealthy on a very short-term basis. You see it in Congressional stock trades (eg buying up Intel ahead of the announcement).

As for the author, I suspect he represents the American corporate view that any kind of government intervention (beyond bail outs) cannot work because they don't want that long term. It would reduce profits and/or make a few people slightly less wealthy. They spend a lot of money on propaganda to convince ordinary people that corporatism is good and collectivisim of any kind is bad, that governments aren't capable of anything, etc.

All Western companies and billionaires want is public-private partnerships because they're a massive wealth transfer from the government to the wealthy. They don't want the government taking away profits from private hands.

> There are multiple ways to describe China's economy but the most accurate and relevant for this topic is that it's a command economy

That brings up an interesting point. It seems to be a conventional wisdom that centrally planned economies don't work (and did not work in cases where they were tried) as well as Western-style capitalism because of the communication and command bottlenecks.

But what if those bottlenecks have been greatly increased in the information age of Internet, other global communication networks, and data collection? The western-capitalist system has the problem of getting stuck in local minima, being driven as a network of actors. What if the downsides of that are finally greater than the performance hit due to central planning bottlenecks?

What is "conventional wisdom"? It's propaganda, basically.

You might be tempted to think of academics as if they're operating independently, almost as if they're in an Ivory Tower where they bless us with missives occasionally as they make deep, apolitical discoveries. But that's just not the case.

There is an entire ecosystem of think tanks and funding to push the neoliberalism agenda. This is entirely self-interested. And it's not necessarily that funding is buying particular opinions. It's that anyone who contradicts this narrative simply gets self-selected out of the academic grants pipeline.

I stend to refer to this as the Tyranny of Austrian Economists [1].

There is an entire industry built to convince people that capitalism is good and collectivism of any kind is bad. It also misattributes the wealth of the developed world to capitalism when it's really about exploitation (eg slavery), colonialism and imperialism.

It's really no different to all the industry funded tobacco research that "proved" how safe smoking was.

Africa isn't poor. The people might generally be poor but Africa is not. It's simply been looted by the West. You don't commit resources to an imperial project that is poor.

If command economies are so unsuccessful why do they need to be isolated and starved (eg Cuba)? Won't they just fail on their own? The whole point is to punish any contradiction to capitalist dogma and to engineer their failure to prove that point.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism#Austrian_School