[coffeemug]

The issues with this are precedent/slippery slope. Today it's a small stake in a small number of companies, but empirically government initiatives almost always grow. Once entrenched, I would be willing to bet that the government will take larger and larger stakes in a bigger and bigger number of companies until this model becomes a non-trivial, potentially dominant, share of the economy. I can see myself becoming a single-issue voter to oppose that future (although given bipartisan support I'm unlikely to have any options; maybe Rand Paul).

[627467]

Anything is a slippery slope if you resign to it. It's not like governments have never been willing (or forced) to privatize or reduce their roles in markets. We are exchanging ideas on a government initiative

[coffeemug]

Not anything. There are domains where precedents empirically don’t balloon and domains where they do. Federal government is nearly always the latter.

[ImPostingOnHN]

Yeah, this is how you get an oligarch system.