Is it Comrade President now? Some conservatives are up in arms about Trump’s decision to have the government buy a stake in Intel.

That’s state ownership of the means of production, isn’t it? Classic, textbook socialism.

“If there is anyone who was a halfway prominent mainstream conservative … 10 years ago who now tells me they wouldn’t have screamed about incipient ‘socialism!’ or ‘fascism!’ about Trump’s Intel ‘investment’,” writes Jonah Goldberg on X, “I presumptively assume they are lying …”

In fact, a whole school of thought on the right, going back decades, has championed industrial policies as bold as Trump’s, if not bolder.

The public face of that school was Pat Buchanan, who was way ahead of the national debate on industrial policy just as he was on immigration.

President Donald Trump is not a socialist, and America has a long history of government getting involved in owning companies — Amtrak is a familiar example.

The for-profit but government-owned passenger-rail company was created under Republican President Richard Nixon.

What Trump is doing with Intel is different from earlier precedents, however. Trump sees the Intel deal as a first step toward creating an American “sovereign wealth fund,” with many more investments to follow.

The president isn’t looking to the past: this is about keeping America competitive with other nations in the 21st century, including Communist China, which controls the world’s second and third largest sovereign wealth funds.

A sovereign wealth fund is much like private investment funds, consisting of stocks, bonds and other assets expected to appreciate in value.

Traditionally, countries rich in national resources, particularly oil, have used sovereign wealth funds to diversify and grow their economies.

Instead of being at the mercy of oil prices, petroleum-rich nations like Norway and Saudi Arabia channel some of their oil revenue into sovereign wealth funds, which then — much like, say, multibillion-dollar university endowments in America — can produce enormous returns.

Norway pays for about 20% to 25% of its national budget with the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund, the Government Pension Fund, which holds more than $1.7 trillion in assets.

Is it a bad thing to pay for government with market profits rather than by raising taxes on citizens or selling debt that eventually has to be repaid with interest?

A nation pays interest on its national debt but earns interest from a sovereign wealth fund.

Mainstream conservatives more than 10 years ago were already behind a plan with many of the same advantages and disadvantages of a sovereign wealth fund: “privatizing” Social Security.

The idea was to let Americans put their compulsory Social Security payments into government-approved funds of their own choosing, which would generate higher returns from market investments than the Social Security Trust Fund could reap from investing exclusively in U.S. Treasury securities.