New York Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani has provoked accusations of impending communism by his proposal to build five municipally owned grocery stores in neighborhoods that are food deserts. To New York\u2019s hedge fund moguls and Republicans everywhere, the specter of Stalinism looms behind this modest attempt to address market failure. Today, fresh fruits and vegetables; tomorrow, the gulag\u2014or something like that.<\/p>\n
No such cries have arisen, however, in response to the news that the Pentagon has become the majority shareholder in MP Materials, which owns the only rare-earths mine in the United States. (Or that the Trump administration\u2019s detentions of documented immigrants for publishing critiques of governmental policy really is a serious step in the direction of gulags, but that\u2019s for a different story.) The government ownership of what is currently the only domestic rare-earths mine and the nation\u2019s leading rare-earths company crosses a much bigger line than Mamdani\u2019s groceries\u2014as one MP Materials lobbyist acknowledged<\/a> to The Washington Post:<\/p>\n Jeff Green, a lobbyist whose firm represents MP Materials and some of its competitors, said the new deal shows that the Trump administration has adopted the Chinese government\u2019s tactics as far as subsidizing critical materials. Green says his firm has been advocating for such subsidies for years, but previous administrations largely viewed it as an issue that should be left to the free market.<\/p>\n Left to the free market, however, MP Materials was routinely underpriced by governmentally subsidized Chinese rare-earth mining companies, which left U.S. automakers, U.S phone companies, U.S. computer companies\u2014really, any U.S. company or government agency that uses high-powered magnets in its products\u2014dependent on a supply chain that began in China. The Obama and Biden administrations, however, were way too wedded to the market\u2014or at least, feared getting the kind of criticism Mamdani is now getting\u2014to suggest that they should actually become the controlling owner of a strategically important private company. For that matter, even during World War II, when the lion\u2019s share of the federal budget was going to arms manufacturers, the Roosevelt administration didn\u2019t take an equity share in any of them. By then, FDR had already been accused on countless occasions of secretly being a socialist, so the wartime Pentagon held not a single share in the multitude of companies for which it was the sole purchaser of their products.<\/p>\n No such constraints limit Donald Trump, however. He already had demonstrated that by having the government take a still ill-defined \u201cgolden share\u201d in U.S. Steel once it was purchased by Japan\u2019s Nippon Steel. National interest, so long as Trump controls the nation, takes precedence over the private control of investment and production. This bolsters the repeated admonitions of democratic socialist leader Michael Harrington that \u201cAny idiot can nationalize; fascists can nationalize; communists can nationalize; capitalists can nationalize; the real issue is to have social control over investment.\u201d<\/p>\n Social control\u2014workers\u2019 control, consumers\u2019 control\u2014has never so much as occurred to Trump or even more traditional Republicans. But Pentagon ownership, in this instance, fits the pattern of Trump cementing the greatest possible control over anything he deems important. And in this instance, having a reliable supply chain of critically important rare earths is certainly in the national interest, just as having a reliable supply chain of the components for medications or any other necessity is in the national interest. The art of Trump\u2019s deals has always been to give him either the maximum profit, the maximum publicity, or the maximum control, and with U.S. Steel and now MP Materials, he at least has satisfied his desire for the third of these. They\u2019re in sync with his nationalism and his ego, and if they have some potential for serving the public good, well, that\u2019s a nice by-product, too, if not his primary motivation.<\/p>\n