[nec4b]

If it has come so far that the government has to steps in than they are probably done. Once government starts to bankroll them, they'll have no incentive to be competitive and all the smart creative people will leave for better pastures.

[setpatchaddress]

Available evidence suggests otherwise.

Tesla and SpaceX probably wouldn't exist if not for government bootstrapping. https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-hy-musk-subsidies-201...

Further back, modern computing / internetworking wouldn't exist without military and DARPA cash from the government. Read any book on the history of these.

[Symmetry]

There's a difference between the government paying for or subsidizing a needed service and the government bailing out a specific company after that company has failed to compete in the market. Successful industrial policy, like the sort South Korea practiced, requires backing the winners not rescuing the losers.

[r00fus]

So a bet on INTC would be for government bailout? I'd say it has a long time to fall still then.

[nec4b]

I don't know whether Intel will ever need government bailout. If however it does need it, it will probably be game over for them to ever become a leader again. There will simply be no incentive for them to innovate.

[cbozeman]

Lockheed and Boeing would both easily get government bailouts if it came to it, for the same reason I believe Intel would.

America can no longer cede ground in high-tech manufacturing to anywhere else in the world.

Hong Kong should have been the wake-up call for this. If China can subjugate Hong Kong, they can subjugate Taiwan. I'm not convinced the average American would support a war against China to free Taiwan, even if it did mean no more iPhones for them.

So the only other option is America has to return to being a bastion a high-tech manufacturing. The Wall Street types don't like this because it doesn't make them enormous margins. They're under the belief that offshoring everything will be fine, because to their mind, commerce and trade are the most important things in the world. They lack the mentality to understand that Communist China simply does not share this mindset.

That should be obvious with China "re-educating" their version of Elon Musk or Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg or whoever you want to compare him to - Jack Ma. No one is above "the Party". This isn't something that Wall Street types understand, because this is extremely bad for business, and they don't "get" why someone would sabotage profits for ideology. I would call it a Western failing, but frankly it was America and our Allies that failed in World War II. We should have listened to Patton and finished off Stalin, and then went to work on Mao, but we lacked the courage to do it.

Now this is where we are.