In December 2008, a month before the end of his presidency and with the smoldering embers of the world economy strewn around him, George W. Bush sat down for an interview with Fox News’s Bret Baier. Struggling to justify the massive economic interventions his administration had just engineered, Bush put his cards on the table. “I’m a free market guy,” he explained. “But I’m not gonna let this economy crater in order to preserve the free market system.”

In a matter of months, decades worth of carefully constructed neoliberal narratives around the feebleness, ineffectiveness, and impropriety of government involvement in the economy came crashing down as first the Bush, then the Obama administrations took decisive action to stop the crisis and resuscitate the economic system. They pumped hundreds of billions of public dollars into the major financial companies, created trillions in new money, and, in some cases, took control of private and quasi-private corporations.

The 2008–9 financial crisis demonstrated that far from being weak and subordinated to markets, government (and especially the federal government) has a variety of important economic tools at its disposal. One of the most powerful is nationalization — the process of bringing privately controlled assets (businesses, land, real estate, services, natural resources, etc.) under public authority. This shift can occur with a transfer of ownership, changes in legal and operational control, or both.