House Republican Rips Trump Admin Taking Stakes In 30 Private Companies: ‘Not the Conservative Position’

(Julia Demaree Nikhinson/AP photo)

Outgoing Rep. Don Bacon (R-NE) jabbed President Donald Trump and his administration on Thursday for taking government stakes in dozens of privately owned companies, calling the unprecedented move the opposite of conservatism.

Bacon shared an MS NOW segment with CATO Institute economics expert Scott Lincicome blasting the government intervention in the private sector and wrote, “This is not the Conservative position.”

In the clip Bacon shared, Lincicome fumed, “The reality is that, since last June, we’ve gone from the government owning zero shares in zero private companies to now owning equity stakes in 30 different companies. In some cases, the government is now the largest shareholder.”

“As that Bloomberg story indicated, often these equity stakes are coerced. If you want your subsidy, if you want your contract or your permit, or if you don’t want the president—in the case of Intel—to call your CEO a Chinese agent, you’d better hand over those equity stakes. It’s a big, big problem, and it raises massive economic questions about capital misallocation and cronyism,” he argued, concluding:

The government is both a shareholder and a regulator. It is a huge issue. We are not talking a lot about it. We’re not talking about the legal authority the government is acting under here—in a lot of cases, that’s very murky.

Bacon’s criticism comes amid Trump’s ongoing attacks against the rising tide of Democratic Socialists in the country. Last week, MS NOW host Joe Scarborough accused Trump’s GOP of being the party actually engaged in socialism in a discussion about the government taking stakes in private companies.

“Also known as socialism,” Scarborough fumed about the move, adding, “This is socialism. This is pre-[Margaret] Thatcher style socialism! And the great irony, here you have Republicans, small government Republicans, running up the deficits, the biggest debt ever, crippling this country, not future generations they’re going to cripple this generation with the biggest budgets ever, the biggest spending ever, the biggest socialized schemes ever.”

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