The One Area Where Democrats Should Follow Trump’s Lead

Nowhere is the case for public ownership clearer than in the defense sector. Lutnick—like Trump, a broken clock—was right when he said that companies like Lockheed Martin already function as quasi-public entities, deriving nearly all their revenue from government contracts. They are, in effect, state enterprises run for private profit.

The same logic applies, more urgently still, to fossil fuels. Oil and gas companies are huge recipients of public support in the form of subsidies, tax breaks, and infrastructure guarantees. Their core incentive is to extract and burn as much carbon as humanly possible. No serious observer still believes the free market can manage the climate crisis. Nationalization would not only ensure that the vast sums of public money already flowing into fossil fuels yields a return for taxpayers. It would also make possible a managed and just transition away from carbon. Norway’s state-owned oil company has demonstrated that public ownership is not only feasible but profitable.

Pharmaceuticals form the third pillar of this argument. All three are life-or-death domains where markets consistently fail people with fatal consequences. The industry’s most profitable products are overwhelmingly built on the back of publicly funded research, much of it financed by the National Institutes of Health. Between 2010 and 2019, every single one of the 356 new drugs approved by the FDA traced its origins to NIH-funded science, according to a 2020 paper by the Institute for New Economic Thinking. Yet the profits accrue almost entirely to private firms, who charge the public exorbitant prices for medicines that it effectively paid to invent. (Trump, meanwhile, has cut nearly $2 billion in research grants to the NIH, gutting the very research pipeline that makes these breakthroughs possible.) Taxpayers finance the breakthroughs, but then are forced to buy them back at inflated prices, often at the cost of debt or denied care.