Staff Reports
The debate over how to Make America Great Again is supposed to be about rebuilding industry, helping working families, and making our country stronger. But two recent moves from the Trump administration — a floated restriction on diesel exports and an expanding program of federal equity stakes in private firms — deserve a sober look. They may be well‑intentioned, but they risk sliding from sensible industrial policy into the kind of state control that has a very bad track record in history.
Diesel export talks and the risk of a blunt fix
Energy Secretary Chris Wright quietly reached out to major refiners last month to see if voluntary limits on diesel exports could ease a spike in domestic prices. That spike was real: retail diesel climbed sharply and market trackers reported U.S. on‑highway diesel touched roughly $6.53 a gallon during the summer‑to‑fall run. But economists warned a hard export ban or heavy limits could backfire. Refiners might cut runs, reduce overall fuel output, and wind up driving up gasoline and heating prices instead of lowering them. In short: a rushed export curb sounds good on a bumper sticker, but the market is a little more complicated than that.
Federal equity stakes: strategic defense or creeping ownership?
At the same time, the federal government has been taking equity‑type positions in dozens of companies — trackers put the number in the high‑30s to low‑40s, with public tallies of many billions of dollars tied up in these deals. Call them stakes, warrants, or “golden shares,” the effect is similar: Washington is showing up as an investor in peacetime industry at a scale we haven’t seen in modern times. That raises familiar conservative concerns about market distortion, governance, and how taxpayers get out of these positions. We can support shoring up critical supply chains without turning the Treasury into an industrial selecting committee.
Why the Franco comparison stings conservatives — and should make them think
The column that put these moves side‑by‑side with Francisco Franco’s mid‑20th‑century autarky wasn’t trying to be dramatic for drama’s sake. Franco’s Spain built an apparatus in the 1940s — the Instituto Nacional de Industria and tight import controls — meant to make Spain self‑sufficient. The promised independence brought rationing, chronic shortages, falling wages, and a long stretch of economic stagnation known in history as the “Years of Hunger.” The point is not that President Trump wants a dictatorship. The point is that state control and protectionism, even with patriotic slogans, can produce economics that hurt workers and families — precisely the people MAGA says it wants to help.
A conservative path to American industrial strength
MAGA’s goals — onshoring production, protecting critical industries, and helping American workers — are good and necessary. The right answers are tax relief for manufacturing, smarter regulation, targeted incentives for strategic industries, public stockpiles for emergency needs, and trade policies that level the playing field without shutting out partners. We should use the power of the market, not the blunt force of state ownership or crude price controls. If Washington wants to be a partner, fine. But being a majority owner with golden shares and emergency price diktats is a shortcut to market trouble. We can be patriotic without repeating the mistakes of autarky. Let’s make America stronger by trusting free enterprise — not by turning our economy into a relic of 20th‑century state control.
