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Aug. 25, 2025 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
25:44
US Stake In Intel Is A Very Bad Idea

There is a word to describe the Trump Administration's acquisition of a ten percent stake in the chip maker Intel, and it's not "communism." Merging the "private" sector with the state has been attempted in the past and it never ends well. Also today, what Vance missed on the Ukraine war.

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Debt Crisis and Denial 00:02:54
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
Today we have Daniel McAdams, our co-host.
Daniel, good to see you this way.
Happy Monday, Dr. Paul.
How are you today?
Doing well, doing well.
Checking up on matters, and same old, same old.
They're still spending money.
And we still have some problems, foreign policy and finance.
Other than that, things are looking good.
But I want to start off with one little clip that was on Zero Hedge.
It's just a reiteration of what we've been saying, but it doesn't hurt to repeat it and try to warn more and more people.
But the article was entitled, The Big Bill, The Bigger Deficit.
How Washington's Spending Spree Could Break the Dollar.
Of course, I think we can endorse that concern.
And it starts off with the big, beautiful bill recently passing.
The Treasury is on TARAC to add another $3.3 trillion to the national debt.
That's a hefty debt.
And it took a long time to spend $1 trillion in this country, many, many years.
That on top of already record-breaking spending and annual deficits to top $2 trillion this year.
Well, boy, that is a concern that the Congress should be expressing.
But it seems to me like they're all oblivious to it.
And it's like they're in denial or they think, well, why don't we get it while the getting's good, see what we can get for our district, and all kinds of rationalization.
But another point was made here, which we talk about a whole lot, is when you see the debt going up here, now the interest payments are definitely above the military.
And of course, the military should be real low.
So if we had our military spending and had an aggressive Department of Defense, so-called defense, it would even be much lower, much lower, because we wouldn't be depending on borrowed money to do all these things, whether it's the welfare state or the warfare state.
But it's continuing, and I think that it's unlikely that all of a sudden they're going to change their ways because it is a fact of life that the people in Congress find the pain of immediately cutting something to be greater than the pain that they can be in denial of.
But I happen to think that we're slowly and steadily losing our liberties.
The deficit gets bigger.
There's closer and closer to a major revamping of the dollar system.
And the conditions here that they don't want to mess with by cutting.
They could just make a token cut.
Government Stake in Intel 00:14:50
And yet, at the beginning of this new administration, after the last election, I thought the expression of the American people was rather clear.
We want cuts, and there was some good news coming out of there.
But they talked about it.
People claim credit for being fiscally conservative, but they never followed through.
Nothing was cut.
So I don't know what can be done to wake up the people, but we're doing our darnest to make sure that people wake up.
And if you can't gradually improve things by cutting back, you better gradually learn a whole lot about survival and bad times.
And already there are a lot of people in this country that are suffering from bad times, and they're being ignored.
And it seems like some of the very wealthy companies have been getting bailouts, as usual, and the whole system of inflation is designed to help the very wealthy, and it's designed to have the middle class and the poor pay the bills.
So we will continue to argue the case for a free market economy and sound money and start by just paying attention to the Constitution.
That's a good idea, Dr. Paul, but unfortunately, our first main story of the day is not a very good step in that direction.
Put that first one up.
He sent this over on yesterday.
Everyone's talking about it.
This is from Politico.
Trump White House takes $10 billion stake in Intel.
That's interesting.
They bought 10% of Intel.
The next one says, President Donald Trump on Friday said the U.S. government had reached a deal to take 10% equity stake in the chip maker Intel worth approximately $10 billion.
Quote from Trump, I said, I think it'd be good having the United States as your partner.
The CEO of Intel agreed, and they've agreed to do it.
And they go to the next one, you can see Luttnick, Treasury Secretary, shaking hands with the CEO of Intel.
They both look very happy.
Howard Lutnick says, big news, the United States of America now owns 10% of Intel, one of our great American technology companies.
This historic agreement strengthens U.S. leadership in semiconductors, which will grow our economy and help secure America's technological aid, thanks to the CEO for striking a deal.
Dr. Paul, I just have to ask, do you think, I'll put that back up just for a second, do you think that the government taking a big stake in Intel strengthens our leadership in semiconductors and grows our economy?
Well, maybe they're worried about how weak it's going to get, and maybe they're trying to prevent it.
No, it's a disaster.
And in a very, very small print on Politico, and I sort of like to look and see what Politico is saying, but in the very small print, I almost had to get my glasses out and read it.
It says, it's an unusual deal with the struggling chip maker.
And the U.S. takes a holding in a private company.
And it said, I think it's different and worse.
But other people who want to make excuses for this say, oh, they've been doing this for years.
They pay, you know, they give benefits to companies all the time.
They have regulations that they can manipulate.
They have loans that can be made and manipulated.
So there's a lot of things going on.
And I still think that people have to be careful and define what they're talking about because people, I come close to saying, this is fascist, but we don't have fascism yet.
We have corporatism.
We have the benefits going to the corporations.
And of course, I remember reading in Human Action that Mises said, yes, that's the way it starts, but it is the road to fascism.
So I think that is what's happening.
And people will be lulled into this.
But I think it's a significant step because there is so much support for the big companies.
I even mentioned that in the opening statement.
They get by, and it's the poor people that suffer the consequences.
But technically, we're not quite there at fascism.
But Mises' argument was this is the step, and it usually always ends up with more or more tyrannical power in the government because there will always be the temptation to regulate and take care of the special interest that keeps the particular government in place.
And so I'm not reassured by those who are saying, oh, we've had a lot of this messing around, but we didn't have free markets.
They didn't mess around With free market ideas.
They messed around with interventionism and inflationism and regulatory system and warmongering, all these things.
So to say that we've been doing this and working with corporations, therefore we shouldn't worry about that, I think that's a hoax.
I think this is enough to think people should be more concerned because it's so blatant.
It's so much in the opening.
And I don't know whether we've ever bought stocks so blatantly and say, oh, we own 10% of ITAL now.
Wonderful.
This is wonderful.
We're good investors, and we have a businessman running the country.
So this is all going to be good.
And maybe our taxes will go down.
Yeah.
Don't hold your breath on that.
It really displays a shocking mentality that Howard Lutnick believes that the government taking control of the private sector strengthens the private sector and strengthens the economy.
But if that's the measure, then why doesn't the government just take over all businesses?
If that's actually an improvement, if the government can run it better, then what's to stop them from taking over every company or taking a stake in every company?
Well, you might ask, why doesn't the government just get away and drop it and let them make the decisions and solve their problems instead of stealing?
Stealing with one group and helping the other one.
And we've mentioned that principle in foreign policy.
We take money from poor people in this country and we say, oh, we're going to help somebody out in another country because there's a good revolution going on there.
We want to help the good guy.
And they end up, the bad guys end up getting the money.
So I think the principle of liberty can be so adaptable if people would use it and understand it.
But they look, they can't see very far in the future.
They say, well, we see somebody invading a country and we have to do something, or we see a problem.
This company is going to go bankrupt and we can't let it go bankrupt.
And so we have to prop it up.
And this is, again, I don't know whether they used that as an excuse, but it's obviously part of it.
I mean, why would they buy this stock?
The secondary thing is, well, we don't want them to fail.
Yeah.
Well, people do have short attention spans and short memories, but it really was only the beginning of this month.
If you talk about why they have problems at Intel, go to that next one.
Here's what Trump posted on Truth Social on August 7th.
He said, the CEO of Intel is highly conflicted and must resign immediately.
There is no other solution to this problem.
Thank you for your attention to this problem.
So he's now picking and choosing who gets to run companies.
But when he did that, put on the next one, and it had an effect, of course, on the company.
If you put the next one on, President Trump called, this is from NBC News, called on Intel CEO Lip Bhutan to resign on Thursday.
That was earlier this month, prompting a slide in the technology company's stock.
Intel did not immediately respond to CBS Money Watch's request for a comment.
Its shares slipped 64 cents or 3% on Thursday.
So Trump said that the Intel CEO has got to go, and then their stock dips, and then the U.S. buys 10% of the company.
Now, why did Trump say that?
He didn't explain it in his post on Truth Social.
But if you go to the next one, it had to do with the typical thing that Trump always does, which is listening to the last person he says.
Apparently, Tom Cotton, our favorite senator, he's a peace-loving, real pro-America senator.
So Tom Cotton wrote him a letter.
And he sent it to President Trump.
And this is what he said.
Mr. Tam, which is the CEO, reportedly controls dozens of Chinese companies and has a stake in hundreds of Chinese advanced manufacturing chip firms.
At least eight of these companies reportedly have ties to the Chinese People's Liberation Army.
So that's all it took.
There's no evidence.
Just Tom Cotton, who's a well-known warmonger who hates China and wants to go to war with China, he writes a letter to Trump saying, well, reportedly, this guy's a bad guy.
And Trump goes on to say he's got to go.
You know, I remember one time somebody said, we'd do much better if we just had a phone book and flipped it open and picked people for our Congress.
And I keep thinking that maybe if they would flip a coin on some of this stuff and making their decision that we'd be better off than all their explanations, because most of the time, you know, they lie and they say, well, we do a little spinning, but it's always special interests and groups banding together to enhance their wealth.
And that works good.
We were very wealthy.
We're getting poorer.
We had a powerful currency.
It's getting weaker.
And I think the end stages are whispering at us.
And it's getting louder and louder.
That doesn't mean that tomorrow the whole thing disappears, but it might be that what if the homeless and the people who are hungry right now, those numbers are going up.
What if that goes up 20% next month or two months from now or next year?
You don't know what the speed is, but then there's ultimately, if Mises is right, he says ultimately, then there's a calamity and everybody throws in the towel.
They haven't done this yet.
They take their towel and they go to the government.
Help us out.
Well, here's how they're doing it.
This is from the politico article.
If you turn that next one on, Intel posted details of the plan soon afterwards, saying the administration would make an $8.9 billion investment in Intel common stock, paid for with CHIPS grant money.
The company said the stake would be funded with $5.7 billion in grants previously awarded but not yet paid from the Defense Department program.
So this CHIPS money, you're talking about the problem with Congress.
This CHIPS money is money that Congress appropriated, authorized to be spent to prop up our chip manufacturing sector.
Now it wasn't supposed to be used to buy companies, but it was still used for a bad purpose.
Well, there are some critiques of this, Dr. Paul.
If you go to the next one, this is one of them, Senator Tom Tillis from North Carolina, who makes a pretty good point.
He says, I don't care if it's a dollar or a billion-dollar stake in an American company.
That starts feeling like a semi-state-owned enterprise out of the Chinese Communist Party.
He said, you're going to have to explain to me how this reconciles with free market capitalism.
So ironically, to compete with China, the U.S. government is behaving like China and taking stakes in companies.
It's unbelievable how they can tolerate that and sleep well at night.
It's always back to the question: is it conspiratorial or are they just stupid and they're well-intended?
But I think they don't think deeply enough on the ramifications, but I think they've been taught.
You know, how many of these members of Congress have we, when we were there, how many did we meet?
You could get a handful that actually have heard about capitalism and free market economy and Austrian economics.
And the rest is all the problem that comes out of the universities now.
And now that we look at their endowments, we find out they're dependent on government money.
The circle is squared.
Well, Thomas Massey also had a good critique of this.
And I think if you put that one next one up, he makes a very good point.
He says our government should not have ownership in private companies.
There are so many specific problems with an arrangement like this, but fundamentally, this is not who we are as a country, which I think is a very subtle way of saying this is not how we do things.
But, you know, going back to our friend and colleague, Chris Rossini, we did a little piece that he wrote over the week and we put it up on RonPaulInstitute.org website, and he explains it really well, as Chris always does.
I'll put that next one up.
The article is titled, Why the U.S. Government's Stake in Intel is Fascism, Not Communism.
Because, you know, all the right-wing influencers that were complaining were talking about how it's communism.
And Chris points out, no, it's actually not.
And he explains it here.
If you go to the next one, fascism is usually the go-to for the powers that shouldn't be because there's a hint of rationality that keeps it from dying quickly.
With fascism, government and corporations are separate, but act as one.
As opposed to communism, government isn't the sole owner of capital.
But now what's wrong with that?
Go to the next one.
What's the problem with it?
Chris explains it very well.
Corporations tied to government are kept in business when they should go bankrupt.
Resources that should be freed to do more positive things, productive things, are instead kept in losing ventures.
With fascism, the big decisions and investments are made not for the consumers, but for the power of the government.
The corporations are arms of the state.
Government won't censor you.
The corporation will, on behalf of the government.
Government won't counterfeit money.
The private bank will on behalf of the government.
Very good explanation of why this is not a good idea.
And, you know, there are economic indicators that they could look at, but they look at and interpret them incorrectly.
And that is the interest rate.
Interest rates are very, very valuable if you're trying to figure out what the market's dealing with.
You know, it's supply and demand and investment and what the people are buying and selling.
So it's critical that they do that.
Interest Rate Debate 00:03:41
But what is the biggest argument right now in the country?
It's what the interest rates should be.
And they're really fighting over there and the whole thing.
You know, I always looked for a healthy debate on the Federal Reserve and what they're going to do and when they're going to audit it and then alter it.
But that isn't what's happening now.
It's who's going to be in charge?
Who's going to be the kingpin?
Who will be the decider?
And right now, Powell is considered to be the decider, but I'm sure he has a few people in the deep state that's whispering in his ears.
But the administration would like to have more power, and that's why they're arguing against the secrecy of the Federal Reserve, that they can deal with it.
But, of course, our argument to have a better understanding of what Chris is talking about, you have to have good indicators that you can trust.
And that would be, you know, first thing off, is free market and monetary policy and sound money.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, we'll move on to our second one, and this is a small one, if you put that up.
Now, JD Vance, who there's a lot to admire about, there's no question about that.
He was on Meet the Press on Sunday, and he was talking about Ukraine.
Now, I understand that he has a lot of pressure.
He certainly can't criticize his boss.
But he said a couple of things are just wrong.
And this is indicative, Dr. Paul, of why the problem can't be solved.
The problem of Russia and Ukraine can't be solved because the decision makers in our government don't understand it and actually are trotting out just plain old falsehoods.
Now, Russia made significant concessions on Ukraine talks.
Trump still has lots of cards to play, said Vance.
He was on Meet the Press.
He claimed that President Trump still has a lot of cards to play to apply pressure to end the war.
I think the Russians have made significant concessions to President Trump for the first time in three and a half years of the conflict, which they haven't made any concessions.
Go to the next one now.
Now, here's what he explains as a major concession.
The vice president suggested that while Russia indeed has maintained the upper hand, it's been unable to do everything it wants.
Quote, they've recognized that they're not going to be able to install a puppet regime in Kiev.
That was, of course, a major demand at the beginning, which is just factually not true.
They never talked about wanting to put a government in Kiev.
The Russians never did.
So he doesn't understand that part.
And again, it's difficult when you don't understand the problem.
Now, go to the next one.
And importantly, said Vance, they've acknowledged that there's going to be some security guarantee to the territorial integrity of Ukraine.
Well, they've been saying that for a long time, Dr. Paul.
The dispute is who are the guarantors of this security guarantee.
And the Russians have said since 2022 that Russia is one of the guarantors of this.
And this hasn't changed.
So, again, it's just a problem, Dr. Paul, of not understanding the policy.
You know, we ask the question: who should be making these decisions?
Really, the people who should be making the decision are the people who have to fight them.
But they never get a vote in the situation.
And somebody else is doing the voting and sending them off to war.
But if they could get away with that, the soldiers.
But what about the whole idea of our management of this debate?
Why Aren't We Listening? 00:04:06
I mean, we're it.
Everybody, no matter what Zelensky says, we pay attention a little bit to Russia and all that.
But really, the concentration of Europe, all the European countries, why are we there?
They say, well, we have the money and the power, and we're the smartest, and we have to bring peace to the world.
And that's why situations like this with empire, people maintaining empires, that's why we're involved there.
It's empire building.
That eventually empires fade away because they spend beyond their means.
I mentioned a few items on the way at the start of the program, and we're approaching that.
So maybe the one thing that would be a blessing would be that we don't think we should be, but we should not be for moral reasons, for constitutional reasons.
We shouldn't have to wait till we bankrupt ourselves because that doesn't make any sense either.
And the people who get the power are the ones who can control the purse and get the bailouts as the value of the money dwindles.
And that's why there's a grab bag up there.
And boy, they are hogging up.
When you talk about these numbers, like $3 trillion deficit.
It's incredible.
Well, I'm going to close out, Dr. Paula, on my behalf by asking people to, if you put that last clip up, something very simple.
Just go to RonPaulInstitute.org, and I recommend you go there every day and read our articles.
We don't put out a ton of articles.
We put out the two or three articles we think that you would benefit most from reading.
And on top of our page today is Dr. Paul's weekly column, which will go up again soon on audio.
But I would also like to direct you to that button up there in the middle called subscribe.
Just click that and subscribe to Ron Paul Institute updates.
We do not bombard you with emails and we do not give out your information, rent it out, or give it out whatsoever.
But I did over the weekend, Dr. Paul, get all of the speeches from our conference, from our friends over at Seymour Mac Productions, the group that does the recording for us.
Great company, by the way.
And I'm in the process of putting them up.
What I will do when they are up is to first send out a notice to our subscribers with links on how you can watch those speeches, whether you were at the event or whether you weren't and are interested in seeing them.
So hit that subscribe, put in your info, and that will help us get you the information you want first, including when will our next conference be?
Which I've heard that question several times recently.
So you'll hear it first if you subscribe to RPI.
Over to you, Dr. Paul.
Very, very good.
You know, I think one thing that I would urge people to do is try to understand how we got into this predicament.
And it seems like there's not much concentration on this, and we talk about it all the time.
You know, it's spending money.
Well, why are we doing this?
And why is the system not working?
And why don't we listen to the Constitution?
And why do we accept these ideas?
And why do we have troops all around the world?
And there are various reasons for them.
Very often it's power and money, almost always.
But it's not there spreading liberty.
You know, I think one of our moral obligations as a nation that believed and preached the gospel of freedom and liberty, we should spread our message, but it should be done in a certain way, not with guns and bullets and pressure and bullying.
It should be done through persuasion.
So we should be setting an example for the world and see that we're doing quite well.
And people want to say, why aren't we doing it like America?
But the majority of the countries in the world, my guess would be that they're getting annoyed with us telling how they should be like America and we should be your boss and we'll get you there as long as you listen to what we tell you to do.
There's a better way and it can be found in the cause of liberty.
I want to thank everybody for tuning in today to the Liberty Report.
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