The government getting in bed with big business is in fact the definition of fascism, a term Mussolini invented. From Doug Casey at internationalman.com:
International Man: The US government recently took a 15% stake in MP Materials and a 10% stake in Intel to counter China’s dominance in rare earth elements and revive the domestic semiconductor industry.
Are these national security necessities, or a fundamental break from free-market capitalism?
Doug Casey: First, whenever you hear the term “national security,” rest assured, some grifter is selling you on a fraud.
It’s natural for the State, like all living entities, to want to grow. The problem is that the State has coercive power, unlike other entities in society. Force and coercion are antithetical to free market capitalism. Worse than that, people think that the State is something magical. They think that “we the people” own the State. So they’re favorably inclined toward State-owned industries, idiotically believing they’re “stakeholders.” Sure. Just like Soviet citizens were stakeholders.
Trump is making some huge mistakes with what you just mentioned about MP Materials and Intel. As well as taking a so-called golden share in US Steel, and forcing Nvidia to pay 15% of its revenue on sales to China. This is all right out of Mussolini’s playbook.
The quote “Fascism should more appropriately be called corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power” is frequently attributed to Benito Mussolini.
This attribution is commonly linked to an article he wrote in the 1932 Enciclopedia Italiana with Giovanni Gentile. (from AI)