John Puri has spent decades watching the federal government hand billions to private companies with nothing more than a press release in return, and he never wrote this column. Now the government has asked for a share, and suddenly it’s a crisis of conservative principles. In “The Shareholder in Chief,” Puri catalogues President Trump’s equity grabs—15 percent of a rare‑earth miner, 10 percent of Intel, more than 20 other stakes—and calls the whole thing a crony‑capitalist abandonment of market neutrality. He’s right that ad‑hoc, unstructured equity deals invite favoritism. The answer to favoritism isn’t “no equity ever.” It’s equity with rules, run through an institution that can’t be worked by the next person with a phone.
The thing Puri won’t mention is that the government was already picking winners with the same pot of money. The CHIPS Act, the green‑energy subsidies, the defense‑industrial loan programs—these are all industrial policy. They steer billions to particular firms, exactly the kind of favoritism he pretends to hate. The only difference in Trump’s version is that the taxpayer got a receipt. I’m told this is cronyism. Walk me through the part where the old arrangement—$5.7 billion in CHIPS Act grants with no equity, no oversight, no upside for the public—was a model of market neutrality. Intel needed the money, the government handed it over, and the shareholders kept every dollar of the gain. Puri napped through that. Now the administration says “fine, but we’ll take 10 percent,” and he’s wide awake, writing about the death of sound governance.
Look at the Intel paragraph in his own piece. Once the government owned a stake, Commerce Secretary Lutnick leaned on Apple, Nvidia, and SpaceX to form partnerships with Intel. Puri flags that as favoritism, and it is. But ask yourself: was the government not already doing that for the old industrial‑policy darlings? Boeing didn’t get a stream of federal contracts and loan guarantees because the market picked it. Tesla didn’t build its early balance sheet on a government loan because the free market was working. The difference is that Trump’s administration took a share. The handout was fine; the receipt was the crime.
So what do we build on the ground where this selective‑outrage column stood? Not the president’s ad‑hoc equity shopping—that’s an invitation to cronyism the moment a less scrupulous team gets the phone. The working alternative is a genuinely public wealth fund, governed by an independent board, with a transparent mandate to invest in strategic industries and return the proceeds to citizens. This isn’t a foreign fantasy. Alaska’s Permanent Fund has cut every resident a dividend for decades from oil revenue. The money goes into a fund, the fund invests, and every Alaskan gets a check. Nobody calls the reddest state in the union socialist. The Bank of North Dakota, a state‑owned bank, has returned its profits to the general fund every year since 1919, and you can still buy a shotgun at the Bismarck Walmart. The common thread isn’t any one leader’s cleverness; it’s a legal structure that separates investment decisions from political favor‑trading and lands the upside in a transparent pot, not a campaign war chest. The hard part—and here’s the beat Puri needs but will never write—is that Alaska didn’t build this with a phone call. It took legislation, an independent board, and decades of trust‑building. The machinery is slow, and the machinery is what makes it work.
The principle Puri is really defending is that the public should absorb the risk but never the reward—that the government’s only legitimate job is to write the check and then get out of the way while the private balance sheet collects the gain. Trump’s method is messy, but the underlying idea—that the public, having paid for the rise, should own a piece of it—is precisely the one we should be arguing over. Not whether the government should ever hold stock, but how to make sure it does so openly, with rules, and with the dividend landing in the pockets of the people who funded the chip fab and the rare‑earth mine in the first place. That’s not the road to China. It’s the road to a country where the cost of picking a winner turns into a check every family can cash.
The real scandal isn’t the share—it’s the free lunch his friends have been eating for decades while he looked the other way.