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Comment by jszymborski | Hacker News Reader

> This $5 billion investment feels more like the result of back-channel discussions with the US government where they "politely" ask NVIDIA to help out Intel in exchange for less restrictions selling chips to China.

Stinks of Mussolini-style Corporatism to me.

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This style of classical fascism or economic fascism, or whatever the term is differentiate it from the modern unrelated usage of fascism, being used in the US is a bit unnerving, and it's crazy that it's usually from the Republican party, who claims to espouse free markets.

It also happened under G. W. Bush with banks and auto manufacturers, but the worst offense was under Nixon with his nationalization of passenger rail.

At least with the bank and car manufacturer bailouts the government eventually sold off their stocks, and with the Intel investment the government has non-voting shares, but the government completely controls the National Railroad Passenger Corporation, (the NRPC aka Amtrak) with the board members being appointed by the president of the United States.

We lost 20 independent railroads overnight, and created a conglomerate that can barely function.

Yeah, the thing about the economy is it's too big for one mind to grasp, you need statistics to make sense of it in aggregate.

If you fiddle and concentrate only on the top performers, the bottom falls out. Most of the US economy is still in small companies.

That's how post-WW2 France was actually rebuilt. You could also see big hints of that in the US WW2 economic effort, which couldn't have been done without the Government taking a direct hold of things and instituting central-ish planning.

You're speaking of what is referred to as neo-corporatism [0] and it's a tripartite, democratic process, not the fascist sort where everything is within and for the benefit of the state [1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporatism#Neo-corporatism

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporatism#Fascist_corporatis...

> democratic process,

There was not that much democracy in the French post-WW2 technocratic establishment, but I agree that they were not technically fascist (nor otherwise).

You try to pin this (hypothetical) as fascism.

Let's assume Trump admin pressured Nvidia to invest in intel.

Chips act (voted by Democrats / Biden) gave Intel up to $7.8 billion of YOUR money (taxes) in form of direct grants.

Was it more of "Mussolini-style corporatism" to you or not?

The parent comment is speculation. But yes, speculatively, a legislative act of investment would be less authoritarian than the whims of an executive that puts tariffs on your product constantly unless you do what he says.

Is the method by which it’s communicated what gives you negative feelings? Because this is an approach to handling the labor dumping that’s been allowed in nearly every industry since the 1980s, and it’s been used numerous times in the US and abroad. They typically only offer temporary relief, while domestic industries should be adjusting and better trade deals get negotiated. The last I checked, that’s been happening to some degree… but it also probably needs to be supported by the ability for companies to borrow money, which the Fed (until recently) seemed hell bent on preventing, while we continued to watch the job market burn to the ground. So cash flush businesses investing in each other to keep competition alive seems like a positive here. Maybe that’s just me?

My comment was only referring to the manner of implementation, not the positive or negative view of the investment.

It isn't the "method of communication". It's legislation vs. coercion (in the speculative scenario from the parent comment).

Most regulation is effectively coercion. The difference is regulation isn’t easily rolled back, whereas the current approach to modifying behavior is (as we’ve seen, numerous times in the last few months even). One is more tolerant of failure than the other.

There is an extreme where policy cannot be modified, and there is an extreme where the whims of one person, and the precedent of having the US government defined as the whims and whiplashes of one person, is immensely harmful to our national credibility. It fucks with investment, immigration and education.

There's big difference between government allocating tax payer dollars by passing a bill than a president using their influence to force dealings between corporate entities that benefit the ruling party.

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