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Fear Government Control of Markets? It's Trump, Not Mamdani, Who's Your Problem.
New York Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani has provoked accusations of impending communism by his proposal to build five municipally owned grocery stores in neighborhoods that are food deserts. To New York’s hedge fund moguls and Republicans everywhere, the specter of Stalinism looms behind this modest attempt to address market failure. Today, fresh fruits and vegetables; tomorrow, the gulag—or something like that.
No such cries have arisen, however, in response to the news that the Pentagon has become the majority shareholder in MP Materials, which owns the only rare-earths mine in the United States. (Or that the Trump administration’s detentions of documented immigrants for publishing critiques of governmental policy really is a serious step in the direction of gulags, but that’s for a different story.) The government ownership of what is currently the only domestic rare-earths mine and the nation’s leading rare-earths company crosses a much bigger line than Mamdani’s groceries—as one MP Materials lobbyist acknowledged to The Washington Post:
Jeff Green, a lobbyist whose firm represents MP Materials and some of its competitors, said the new deal shows that the Trump administration has adopted the Chinese government’s tactics as far as subsidizing critical materials. Green says his firm has been advocating for such subsidies for years, but previous administrations largely viewed it as an issue that should be left to the free market.
Left to the free market, however, MP Materials was routinely underpriced by governmentally subsidized Chinese rare-earth mining companies, which left U.S. automakers, U.S phone companies, U.S. computer companies—really, any U.S. company or government agency that uses high-powered magnets in its products—dependent on a supply chain that began in China. The Obama and Biden administrations, however, were way too wedded to the market—or at least, feared getting the kind of criticism Mamdani is now getting—to suggest that they should actually become the controlling owner of a strategically important private company. For that matter, even during World War II, when the lion’s share of the federal budget was going to arms manufacturers, the Roosevelt administration didn’t take an equity share in any of them. By then, FDR had already been accused on countless occasions of secretly being a socialist, so the wartime Pentagon held not a single share in the multitude of companies for which it was the sole purchaser of their products.
No such cries have arisen, however, in response to the news that the Pentagon has become the majority shareholder in MP Materials, which owns the only rare-earths mine in the United States. (Or that the Trump administration’s detentions of documented immigrants for publishing critiques of governmental policy really is a serious step in the direction of gulags, but that’s for a different story.) The government ownership of what is currently the only domestic rare-earths mine and the nation’s leading rare-earths company crosses a much bigger line than Mamdani’s groceries—as one MP Materials lobbyist acknowledged to The Washington Post:
Jeff Green, a lobbyist whose firm represents MP Materials and some of its competitors, said the new deal shows that the Trump administration has adopted the Chinese government’s tactics as far as subsidizing critical materials. Green says his firm has been advocating for such subsidies for years, but previous administrations largely viewed it as an issue that should be left to the free market.
Left to the free market, however, MP Materials was routinely underpriced by governmentally subsidized Chinese rare-earth mining companies, which left U.S. automakers, U.S phone companies, U.S. computer companies—really, any U.S. company or government agency that uses high-powered magnets in its products—dependent on a supply chain that began in China. The Obama and Biden administrations, however, were way too wedded to the market—or at least, feared getting the kind of criticism Mamdani is now getting—to suggest that they should actually become the controlling owner of a strategically important private company. For that matter, even during World War II, when the lion’s share of the federal budget was going to arms manufacturers, the Roosevelt administration didn’t take an equity share in any of them. By then, FDR had already been accused on countless occasions of secretly being a socialist, so the wartime Pentagon held not a single share in the multitude of companies for which it was the sole purchaser of their products.
https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/2025-07-17-government-control-of-markets-trump-pentagon-rare-earths/