‘It’s always a mistake to say…’: US Senator Rand Paul criticises Trump administration’s 10% stake decision in Intel

Days after the Trump administration announced that it is taking a 10% stake in embattled chipmaker Intel, US Senator Rand Paul has criticised the decision, saying that the investment is “a step towards socialism.” The chipmaker announced last month that the US government made an $8.9 billion investment in Intel common stock.Rand said government ownership in Intel is ‘a bad idea’.“It’s always a mistake to say, ’Well we have this one bad policy, all right, we’ll tolerate a little socialism, but we don’t want anymore,” Paul told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Wednesday.“I worry that the free market movement, the movement that was a big part of the Republican Party, is being diminished over time,” Rand added.Last month, President Donald Trump said that the government’s stake in the chipmaker is a “great Deal for America, and, also, a great Deal for INTEL.”In August, the Trump administration announced a new policy that would take a 15% cut of certain chip sales by Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) to China. This move was part of a broader strategy to assert control over critical industries, the report by CNBC noted. The government also made a significant investment in a rare-earth miner, buying a $400 million equity stake in MP Materials, and secured a "golden share" in US Steel as part of the deal that allowed Nippon Steel to acquire the company.Senator Bernie Sanders, meanwhile, supported a proposal to tie government subsidies to public ownership. In an interview last month, Sanders argued, “Taxpayers should not be providing billions of dollars in corporate welfare to large, profitable corporations like Intel without getting anything in return.”