When the State Becomes Shareholder: A Catholic Case Against America’s Drift Toward Socialism

A 10% stake in Intel is only the beginning. What we should fear is the end.

In 1931, Pope Pius XI warned of a “grave evil” in his encyclical Quadragesimo Anno: the temptation of centralized power to absorb the functions of families, associations, and businesses. He called it a violation of the natural order—a usurpation of human freedom and responsibility. That warning feels startlingly relevant today, as the U.S. government begins to purchase equity stakes in private corporations.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s decision to take a 10% ownership share in Intel, and the announcement that other companies will follow, is not just a terrible economic maneuver; it is a moral error that blurs the lines between the state and the individual. It signals a bipartisan disturbing drift away from the principle of subsidiarity and toward the socialist model of direct state ownership and control of production.

Too often, debates about government takeovers focus only on efficiency, corruption, or budgetary risks. These are real problems, but they are not the most serious ones we are having in America today. The deepest danger is anthropological and spiritual: State ownership alters how human beings see themselves, their work, and their communities. And both major political parties seem to think that the job of the president is to control what we do in the economic realm, and thus in the personal realm.

Continue reading the entire piece here at Acton Institute

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Daniel Di Martino is a graduate fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a Ph.D. student in economics at Columbia University, and the founder of the Dissident Project, a speakers’ bureau for young immigrants from socialist countries.

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