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.
Work, in Catholic thought, is not merely about output or profit. It is a vocation, a way in which the human person, made in the image of God, participates in the ongoing creation of the world. Ownership, too, is more than legal control; it is stewardship, responsibility, and freedom in action.
When the state inserts itself as an owner of business, it distorts that moral ecology. Workers no longer see their labor as serving families, customers, or shareholders, but as serving political masters. Entrepreneurs no longer innovate for the sake of excellence or service, but for bureaucratic approval and investment. Citizens no longer think of themselves as co-creators of prosperity, but as clients of the state. And the state, also a human institution, transforms from an arbiter and steward of the sovereignty of the nation into a tyrannical institution that directs our daily lives.
This is the real poverty of socialism: not just empty shelves, but empty souls. You won’t choose what you do for a living, where you live, or what you purchase.
Of course, America is not a socialist nation, nor does this move to take 10% of Intel’s share suddenly transform America into Venezuela or Cuba. But it does represent another step in the direction set by the Biden administration, when the state sought to shift resources away from the more productive sectors of the economy and toward the green energy and chips sector by way of a host of inefficient mandates.
Conservatives and Catholics in general have highlighted the principle of subsidiarity as one of the keys of our worldview and understanding of the role of human institutions. Subsidiarity holds that social and economic functions should be carried out by the smallest, most local entity capable of doing so. Families raise children; parishes tend to spiritual life; businesses produce goods and services; civil society nurtures the bonds of trust. The state has a role, but it is supportive and protective, not domineering; it administers courts, supplements private charities by helping the poor, and funds public goods.
When Washington becomes shareholder of Intel—or any other company—it destroys this balance. Decisions that belong to boards and markets are now subject to political interference. Even if officials promise to be passive shareholders, as they do today, power once seized is rarely relinquished, and usually is expanded. Who doesn’t think that a future Democratic administration will use taxpayer dollars to “invest” in green energy companies in the name of fighting climate change? Or even in abortion clinics in the name of protecting “women’s health”?
When the principle of subsidiarity is broken, things don’t go very well. The prime examples are the U.S. Postal Service and Amtrak, which operate under federal government ownership. The result in both cases are chronic deficits that the taxpayer must bail out and inefficient management decisions to please voting groups like unions interested only in protecting their privileges, not serving the public good. If this is what happens with mail delivery and trains, why should we expect better outcomes with microchips?
Subsidiarity reminds us that just because the state can intervene does not mean it should. The moment government assumes responsibilities that private initiative can and is performing, it commits what Catholic teaching calls an “injustice” and a “disturbance of right order.” Worse, it can even change the culture, as it did in my native Venezuela, where the government took the “key industry” of oil and gas. While I was growing up, few people, even regime opponents, imagined the possibility of oil being a competitive private industry because it had been state-owned for decades. Once the government steps in a sector, society forgets that the private sector can work, so it rarely ever steps back out of fear of market failure.
Defenders of the Intel takeover insist this is about national security. Semiconductors are strategic, they argue, and thus require state influence. But history teaches us that such arguments are endlessly elastic. What is more strategic and in need of security than the food supply? So should the government own grocery stores? New York City Socialist candidate for mayor Zohran Mamdani seems to think so. What is more important for defense and daily life than energy? Is there anyone who thinks the federal government should take over shares of Chevron and Exxon? Perhaps. If “importance” or “security” justifies state ownership of Intel, there is no limiting principle. Why stop at 10%? Why not go all the way to 99%?
More insidious is the moral corruption that follows. Businesses begin to seek favor rather than serve customers. Lobbyists replace engineers as the drivers of innovation. Cronyism becomes the currency of success. This is the antithesis of free enterprise and a violation of justice, but it is daily life in a socialist nation.
The state’s proper tool for securing the common good in such industries is properly limited regulation and taxation, not ownership. Taxes and laws can be crafted to protect national security. But equity stakes cross a line into socialism.
The 20th century is filled with examples of state ownership degenerating into stagnation and repression. From Britain’s nationalized industries to the outright confiscations in Eastern Europe, the results were consistent: declining productivity, entrenched bureaucracies, and moral decay.
My homeland, Venezuela, offers a more recent warning. Each government takeover—whether of oil, electricity, or food distribution—was justified in the name of justice or security. Each ended in waste, corruption, and collapse. What was lost was not only prosperity, but hope, responsibility, and faith in one another.
Catholic teaching helps us understand why. When the state takes over, it denies the individual and the community the space to act freely, responsibly, and virtuously. It undermines what Pope St. John Paul II, in Centesimus Annus, called “the subjectivity of society”—the idea that families, associations, and enterprises are real communities of persons, not mere instruments of the state.
The Church affirms the universal destination of goods: All creation is intended for the good of all. But it also insists on the inviolability of the right to private property, which is a means of ensuring stewardship. Ownership creates responsibility. It teaches us to care, to plan, to sacrifice, and to think of others.
State ownership short-circuits this moral training. If everything belongs to the state, then nothing belongs to anyone. The incentive to steward well disappears, replaced by the incentive to exploit, consume, or defer responsibility upward. The tragedy of the commons spreads.
This is why even when socialism succeeds in distributing goods for a time, it fails in forming virtuous people. It produces not stewardship, but dependency. Not solidarity, but resentment. Not dignity, but despair. Socialism can only consume wealth but never produce it, which is why socialism doesn’t end consumerism—it exacerbates it.
Again, America is not Venezuela. It is not the Soviet Union of old. But the creep of socialism is real. Once the principle is conceded—that the state may own businesses in the name of fairness or security—each new intervention becomes easier. To remind that the slope is slippery is not fear-mongering. It is happening every year as the size of the American government grows larger in proportion to total economic output.
At stake is not only economic efficiency and wealth but the moral health of the nation, too. Do we want a society where initiative, stewardship, and responsibility are nurtured? Or one where political connections and bureaucratic favors determine outcomes? Do we want citizens or clients, creators or dependents, free men and women or wards of the state?
The greatest danger of the Intel takeover is not the immediate financial loss but what it represents about the economic and spiritual path of America. When the state becomes shareholder, the people become servants: Our work loses its dignity, our communities lose independence, our faith in freedom disappears.
Catholic Social Teaching reminds us that true liberty is not the absence of order but the presence of responsibility. It is built from the ground up—family by family, parish by parish, business by business, and we all have a role in God’s plan. The state’s role is to protect this liberty, not to supplant it.
If America forgets this, it will discover what Venezuelans did, but too late: that socialism does not only empty wallets. It empties souls.
