Too Big to Nationalize

The moment a company becomes critical infrastructure, it has a responsibility to the public, and the men who revere capitalism as America's highest ideal cannot comprehend why.

I was informed of numerous things about capitalism this week. I said on X that I support nationalizing SpaceX because Musk is running his own private foreign policy with Starlink, and that this is my entire justification. What returned was a catechism. Capitalism accounted for his success. Capitalism guarantees the United States’ ongoing prosperity. Private property rights are essentially sacrosanct, and “asset seizure in one persons concept of ‘the national interest’ is a fundamentally communist concept.” Starlink is basically “a commercial network with a TOS agreement, just like any digital service you subscribe to.” The company is simply too big to nationalize anyway, so I ought to stop yelling. One man inquired if I’d like to seize the means of production, and added a smirk so I’d know he was the amusing one.

None of them addressed the argument, which fits in a sentence. When a business becomes critical infrastructure, its relationship with society alters. If SpaceX builds a near-monopoly on satellite internet, no matter how objectively good the product is, and its CEO then uses it to conduct foreign policy according to his own politics and against the interests of the United States, the company has violated the public trust. Full stop.

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Starlink is a technological accomplishment, and I have always said as much. It functions approximately two-thirds of all active satellites in orbit, more than all other operators combined, and in one quarter last year it accounted for 97% of satellite internet speed tests worldwide. Ukraine runs its drones on it. This is what critical infrastructure entails. It is the thing individuals cannot do without, and the moment they cannot do without it, the person who owns it holds their lives in his hands whether he requested that responsibility or not.

On October 14, he shut his hand. The military-grade version of Starlink that Ukraine depends on had its speeds limited, so that any drone flying faster than 100 miles an hour lost its connection. According to The Wall Street Journal, Musk himself imposed the limits, after he had discussed Ukraine with Trump, and officials disagree on whether he acted alone or consulted with the administration first. Its journalists discovered a Ukrainian unit that dispatched six drones to a Russian army warehouse. One hit the warehouse. The commander stated that his drones now have to fly slower, and the Russians are bringing more of them down. Each Ukrainian drone that falls means a Russian warehouse remains standing, or a Russian drone that gets through to a Ukrainian apartment block.

The defenders continue to reach for the same phrase. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Washington had not cut Ukraine’s access, and pointed instead to the terms of service Kyiv needed to comply with. My response guy stated similarly: a commercial network with a TOS agreement. This is the private foreign policy, put simply by the individuals who claim it doesn’t exist. Whether Ukrainian drones reach their targets is now a question of contract compliance, adjudicated by a billionaire who has complained about Ukraine’s strikes on Russian refineries. I view that as a betrayal of American interests, and the American public, which sides with Ukraine over Russia 57% to 4%, seems not to disagree. My previous essay discussed the finger-pointing among Musk, Rubio and Trump that followed. The fog does not affect whoever had his hand on the switch.

One person asked if I would also like to nationalize Microsoft, since the Pentagon operates on its software. As of this writing, Microsoft seems not to be pursuing an independent foreign policy in the conduct of a foreign war. The test was not about size or success or whether I liked the CEO. It is whether a private owner has taken something the public cannot do without and made it an instrument of his own will. The concept is much older than any of us. When the Supreme Court allowed Illinois to regulate Chicago’s grain elevators in 1877, it stated that property used in a manner affecting “the community at large” becomes “clothed with a public interest.” Generations of Americans grasped this without needing it explained. It took a generation brought up on Ayn Rand and a podcast microphone to forget this.

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I find it hard to be only angry at the men in my replies, because some of what I feel is pity. They talk about capitalism the way earlier Americans spoke of liberty, as the thing the country is for. However, capitalism is a system where the owners of capital retain their profits and invest them in additional capital, which can be beneficial and has never been a justification to exist. You won’t find it in the Declaration of Independence or the Preamble, which speak of justice, the common welfare and the blessings of liberty. These individuals have taken a mechanism and constructed a church around it, and the deity of the church is a man who has informed them that most people “unthinkingly believe whatever their political tribe tells them to believe. Like an NPC in a video game.” They are defending, without pay and with genuine emotion, his right to determine which Ukrainians get to defend themselves. They picture themselves in the cabin with him. He would throw them out the airlock on the way to Mars to conserve oxygen, and he would not pause to watch.

The worship is worst in my own field, among individuals who should know better. Engineers who would never allow a colleague to merge code without review regard his posts as revealed truth. Founders and investors fill their timelines with tributes to his brilliance, as if proximity might rub off. Jack Dorsey, who co-founded Twitter, responded to Musk’s deal to purchase it by labeling him “the singular solution I trust.” This is the parasocial devotion of a teenager to a pop star, exhibited by grown men with board seats, and it concludes the way those devotions always conclude. The star never learned their names.

Among these are the anarcho-capitalists, who envision companies as private empires situated alongside nation-states, and they are simply fools. They read The Sovereign Individual and decided that a person with enough satellites is a country. The Kingdom of Property operates on this fantasy, and it necessitates not recognizing where the empire’s money originated. SpaceX drew more than 80% from government contracts in the early 2020s. Their self-made sovereign is a defense contractor. Even the sovereign individual has always had a licensing department.

Nor do they object to the state owning companies, so long as the correct president does so. When Trump took a 9.9% stake in Intel through executive action and boasted that the country paid nothing for it, I don’t remember a single one of them warning that America was finished. They referred to it as dealmaking, which indicates their faith in property is negotiable and their loyalty to Musk remains unwavering.

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Regarding the law, it is not complex. The Fifth Amendment allows private property to be “taken for public use“ with just compensation. Madison drafted it in 1789, decades before Marx was born, so the communism charge says more about the reading habits of the man making it than about the idea. It would require an act of Congress, a reasonable price paid to shareholders and courts to resolve the disputes. Due process, the thing that these men claim to cherish, is the whole mechanism. And when they warn that Republicans will win again someday and be in control of it, they have stumbled upon the point. Power held by an elected government shifts when the public alters its mind. Power held by Musk is transferred when Musk dies, and not prior.

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I wrote back to one of them that once people’s lives depend on a thing, the person who built it does not get to say it is theirs to do with as they want. You exist within a society. When your decisions result in people being killed, the rest of us have a right to intervene. This is the argument. They respond to a different question, the one regarding envy, because envy is the sole motive they can envision for wanting something to be shared.

What they refer to as the end of America is the end of an exemption. For twenty years they have been informed that their talent positioned them above the usual obligations, that the producers are natural rulers and the rest of us are freeloaders waiting to take what they built. They have confused the indulgence of a country with its foundation. The country was founded on the opposite idea, that no man’s private power is beyond the reach of the public’s claim on him. When we take our country back, I intend to see that idea honored, and I expect the men in my replies to discover they were never in the cabin at all.

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Go Deeper into the Circus

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