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.
"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."
Of course they can't. They dream of being in control of ANYTHING. It might interest them to know that Microsoft's egregious abuse of its position means it is being ejected from nearly every government in Europe in favour of an open-source alternative. So yes, to some degree Microsoft is indeed being taken over by governments or at least replaced by them. And quite a lot of us are moving to these open-source alternatives that won't rank the prices up year after year, for the simple reason the price is nothing... And we keep our own data.
“Which reinforces the point that control of Starlink must, one way or another, be taken away from Elon Musk. It’s a matter of national security: we cannot let private individuals make foreign and defense policy, and it would be totally irresponsible to leave a crucial military asset in the hands of a racist, authoritarian conspiracy theorist.”
I agree that it is detrimental to the earth and all its inhabitants for one person to be in complete control of ANYTHING. The internet, the electrical grid, space exploration, AI, social media, water rights, mineral rights, submarine cabling, the stock market, shipping, weapons building, governmental services, etc. Clear and present danger.
As it happens, Musk did not succeed all on his own. He benefits from a lot of basic research supported by our tax dollars. We all have a stake in how that research is to be used, and deserve to benefit directly from our investments in appropriate measure. He may be entitled to the fruits of innovation and management, but he also is fully dependent on us for having any stake whatsoever, an ongoing obligation to us taxpayers and our national interests.
Excellent essay. And to pick up one thread: the answer to the question is 'Yes'. MS should've been nationalized.
Microsoft's court-ordered break-up should have happened in 2000 as part of its antitrust violations. And as (now retired) Kimball P. Marshall, PhD first proposed to me 30+ years ago, certain versions of MS-DOS should've been nationalized. Full stop.
Thank you. Invoking TOS seldom happens in the traditional networking business because government oversight insured equity was applied. Monopolies like Space X for now can operate above the market for political gain. Not new behavior- see ATT and IBM 1960-1980.
You are correct. The solution is simple. And, you have listed examples of when this kind of thing has happened before. Unfortunately, we are truly poor scholars of history.
Thank you again, for reminding us that for all their faults, our founding fathers were not only intellectually sharp but also had a common decency and respect for their fellow man that this generation has seem to forgot.
This is complicated and yet, so many smart economic (Paul Krugman), military (Malcolm Nance) are also advocating to 'nationalize' Space X or what/whichever entity Elon is operating under. The point is tax payers paid for this, gives the contracts to continue the work... without us, Elon's networth tanks. Fast.
Another aspect of Elon's coupe of our foreign policy as directed by Congress is, well, arguably in the treason category: Treason is strictly defined in Article III, Section 3 of the U.S. Constitution as only consisting of levying war against the United States, or adhering to its enemies by giving them aid and comfort." Congress.gov.
Thanks for bringing this up, MIke! So critical to move on this however we can!
I agree this is an unacceptable arrangement. In this particular case, if it forces Zelensky to accept a peace, then the world, and especially Ukraine, is better off. The Russophobia that has consumed the western imagination has led to hysteria-based policy. When I tell people this, they bring up the irrelevant argument that Putin has done bad things. I didn’t like the Taliban, but I’m glad we finally got out of there. The West’s willingness to provoke Russia, for whatever hypocritical reason, is itself a crime against humanity. We need a stable, cooperative, collaborative, integrated relationship with Russia because the post-1945 reality is that spiraling escalation between the great powers spells the end of people existing.
"Russophobia" implies an irrational fear of Russia or Russians.
I suggest that you hear out people much more familiar with the reality of both.
"Every informed and honest observer of the war raging in the center of Europe knows that Moscow is the only party responsible for it. Not Ukrainian sovereignty. Not the imagined provocations. And most certainly, not the so-called “NATO enlargement.” This poisonous phrase was invented in the Kremlin, and it falsely attributes the initiative to a defensive alliance, notoriously reluctant to admit new members, rather than to the sovereign states that rushed to join it because they understood exactly what threat Moscow posed. Russian imperial ethos chose war – more on this later – and Putin happened to be at the helm to wage it."
"My personal #1 disappointment of this war are the “progressive” intellectuals. Turns out, their anti-imperialism is not applicable to Eastern Europe.
"Check the way Noam Chomsky is framing the “expanding NATO” narrative (excerpt from CounterPunch). He couldn’t care less if Poland “wants” to join NATO. In his eyes, we are just mindless pawns, dragged to NATO by Clinton, who “admitted” he did it solely for “domestic political reasons”."
"If you have found yourself at any point repeating narratives that, upon reflection, served Russian strategic interests - whether about NATO expansion, or energy policy, or refugee crises, or any of the dozens of other topics that have been systematically seeded - this does not reflect poorly on your intelligence.
"It reflects well on the engineering.
"These are state-level operations backed by institutional budgets, executed by professionals who have refined their methods across decades, deployed through channels specifically calibrated to your psychological profile, and anchored in genuine grievances and verified facts that give the overall narrative its protective armour of credibility."
There it is again, the zombie ideology: any position which also happens to be consonant with some interest of Putin or Russia, or which has been explicitly taken up by them, is by definition one that has been engineered and not independently arrived at by its exponent. William Burns, George Kennan, John Mearsheimer - Russian stooges too?
The claim is the unfalsifiable gift that keeps on giving. There is no limit to the smearing and misrepresentation that can be accomplished with the charge. It was made against the civil rights movement, more recently against the Black Uhuru socialists in St. Louis, and it will continue to be made, it seems, until the end of time as a specious distortion.
NATO is a military alliance that is explicitly hostile to Russia. This is not hidden. It is absurd to suggest that it reluctantly subsumed additional countries under its umbrella since the Cold War. Even without knowing anything else, the very notion violates every known law of power and expansion from the origin of history.
Thank you for your thoughtful reply. I don’t have time to read all the links. The failure of thought I hinted at in my comment was that two things can be true at the same time: the Russian invasion can be a bad choice and the West’s provocations and response can also have been a bad choice. Almost without fail, defenses of NATO and the US get confused here. Apparently many Ukranians are also not “informed and honest observers”. Whether a talking point aligns with Russian strategic interests is irrelevant. The attitude that “Russia must be resisted at all cost” as an unquestionable starting point to any conversation is how the western discussion derailed so early on. The EU and Ukraine even criminalize dissent against this premise. The counter-argument usually again points out some irrelevant stuff about how Russian society isn’t free. By this logic, the Iraq War was justified because “Saddam Bad”.
Nationalizing just means making the thing that is nationalized public. It's only difficult for people in the U.S. to conceive of doing this because of decades of being cauterized against any notion that doing it could not fail to be disastrous, and because a capitalist economy has been endowed with the aura of it being the default which only afterwards is to be rationally controlled, but to which society must defer in the first instance as if it were a law of nature. It is not a law of nature, and is not entitled to be assumed.
In the U.S., it seems always to require a "national security" issue to make nationalization, or any movement of society in a more humane direction, a live possibility, and for it to make sense, just like "gays in the military" was believed to be a prerequisite that must be satisfied before gay people could have unqualified equality. This is something to pay attention to: a right-wing or “centrist” imperialist aim or interest must always be coupled with something salutary in itself, and before reputed public intellectuals worried about losing their credibility, e.g., Paul Krugman, will opine on behalf of the thing that should be sought for its own sake.
It should not be controversial (but it is) to start from the proposition that certain public goods are not for sale - end of story - and then capitalism can have the remainder so long as it does not infringe on those public goods. What those public goods are is debatable, but it should include basically everything we need to live decently: housing, food, education, and health care right off the bat, but also libraries, parks, art, media, access to nature, and to the democratic process. One can think of others, but it does not require that the thing to be nationalized must be so-called "critical infrastructure".
This kind of publicly directed cultural and political reorientation must include limits on the quantity of wealth any one person can own or control, not just because it’s just and protects the commons, but because it is ludicrous to assert that any one person deserves more than that limit no matter what innovation they might have contributed. Wealth beyond that number just means that other people’s contributions are not being acknowledged, or are being stolen. I think that limit should be set much lower than most: $20,000,000 (that number should also be uncontroversial, but it isn't).
As a “freeloader” I appreciate you stepping up and saying what my fellow citizens think of these “producers” and their concept of community, morality, equality, and humanity. May they never inherit the earth.
Some excerpts:
…”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.”
— "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.
“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.”
Hi Mike, I take your point and certainly critical infrastructure has a responsibility to the public. Meanwhile, I would hardly trust the Trump administration with the behemoth any more than Musk. As you state, 80% funding through government contracts should come with a lot of caveats and regulations. Both for-profit and not-for-profits like teaching/research hospitals and universities have to fill out massive applications for competitive grants and there are loads of regulations involved. I am not so sure ownership of Starlink by the federal government is as critical as higher levels of regulation and independent watchdog oversight.
Today’s corporations are small potatoes when compared to the East India Company. It conquered the Indian subcontinent with its army of 50,000, then taxed and suppressed the populace. It owned almost the entire dock works of London, the then-Financial Capital of the world. When France wanted to imprison Napoleon on the Isle of Saint Helena, it had to rent the island from the East India Company. When the British Parliament, which had more than a few members who were shareholders of the East India Company, decided no private company should set government policy, it began splitting up the East Indian Company and eventually dissolved it. Regulatory capture has its limits. Elon Musk has finally overreached far enough that both sides of the Congressional aisle have had enough of him. Gwen Shotwell is perfectly capable of running SpaceX and its various divisions. When the administration recovers from Porcupine Syndrome (pointing in all directions), Trump, Rubio, et alia will throw Musk under the bus. Somebody gave Putin a heads-up in re the coming slowdown of StarShield, and that somebody must pay the price.
"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."
Of course they can't. They dream of being in control of ANYTHING. It might interest them to know that Microsoft's egregious abuse of its position means it is being ejected from nearly every government in Europe in favour of an open-source alternative. So yes, to some degree Microsoft is indeed being taken over by governments or at least replaced by them. And quite a lot of us are moving to these open-source alternatives that won't rank the prices up year after year, for the simple reason the price is nothing... And we keep our own data.
Here’s Krugman’s take:
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/its-time-to-take-starlink-away-from?r=2xzu7b&utm_medium=ios
All of it, but particularly:
“Which reinforces the point that control of Starlink must, one way or another, be taken away from Elon Musk. It’s a matter of national security: we cannot let private individuals make foreign and defense policy, and it would be totally irresponsible to leave a crucial military asset in the hands of a racist, authoritarian conspiracy theorist.”
Yes, exactly.👍
I agree that anything used by the military should be nationalized!!!!!!!
I agree that it is detrimental to the earth and all its inhabitants for one person to be in complete control of ANYTHING. The internet, the electrical grid, space exploration, AI, social media, water rights, mineral rights, submarine cabling, the stock market, shipping, weapons building, governmental services, etc. Clear and present danger.
As it happens, Musk did not succeed all on his own. He benefits from a lot of basic research supported by our tax dollars. We all have a stake in how that research is to be used, and deserve to benefit directly from our investments in appropriate measure. He may be entitled to the fruits of innovation and management, but he also is fully dependent on us for having any stake whatsoever, an ongoing obligation to us taxpayers and our national interests.
You have very effectively pointed out the danger os a single point of failure. May we learn this lesson again!
Excellent essay. And to pick up one thread: the answer to the question is 'Yes'. MS should've been nationalized.
Microsoft's court-ordered break-up should have happened in 2000 as part of its antitrust violations. And as (now retired) Kimball P. Marshall, PhD first proposed to me 30+ years ago, certain versions of MS-DOS should've been nationalized. Full stop.
Thank you. Invoking TOS seldom happens in the traditional networking business because government oversight insured equity was applied. Monopolies like Space X for now can operate above the market for political gain. Not new behavior- see ATT and IBM 1960-1980.
You are correct. The solution is simple. And, you have listed examples of when this kind of thing has happened before. Unfortunately, we are truly poor scholars of history.
Thank you again, for reminding us that for all their faults, our founding fathers were not only intellectually sharp but also had a common decency and respect for their fellow man that this generation has seem to forgot.
This is complicated and yet, so many smart economic (Paul Krugman), military (Malcolm Nance) are also advocating to 'nationalize' Space X or what/whichever entity Elon is operating under. The point is tax payers paid for this, gives the contracts to continue the work... without us, Elon's networth tanks. Fast.
Another aspect of Elon's coupe of our foreign policy as directed by Congress is, well, arguably in the treason category: Treason is strictly defined in Article III, Section 3 of the U.S. Constitution as only consisting of levying war against the United States, or adhering to its enemies by giving them aid and comfort." Congress.gov.
Thanks for bringing this up, MIke! So critical to move on this however we can!
I agree this is an unacceptable arrangement. In this particular case, if it forces Zelensky to accept a peace, then the world, and especially Ukraine, is better off. The Russophobia that has consumed the western imagination has led to hysteria-based policy. When I tell people this, they bring up the irrelevant argument that Putin has done bad things. I didn’t like the Taliban, but I’m glad we finally got out of there. The West’s willingness to provoke Russia, for whatever hypocritical reason, is itself a crime against humanity. We need a stable, cooperative, collaborative, integrated relationship with Russia because the post-1945 reality is that spiraling escalation between the great powers spells the end of people existing.
"Russophobia" implies an irrational fear of Russia or Russians.
I suggest that you hear out people much more familiar with the reality of both.
"Every informed and honest observer of the war raging in the center of Europe knows that Moscow is the only party responsible for it. Not Ukrainian sovereignty. Not the imagined provocations. And most certainly, not the so-called “NATO enlargement.” This poisonous phrase was invented in the Kremlin, and it falsely attributes the initiative to a defensive alliance, notoriously reluctant to admit new members, rather than to the sovereign states that rushed to join it because they understood exactly what threat Moscow posed. Russian imperial ethos chose war – more on this later – and Putin happened to be at the helm to wage it."
https://chakhoyan.substack.com/p/russia-the-unmysterious-aggressor
"My personal #1 disappointment of this war are the “progressive” intellectuals. Turns out, their anti-imperialism is not applicable to Eastern Europe.
"Check the way Noam Chomsky is framing the “expanding NATO” narrative (excerpt from CounterPunch). He couldn’t care less if Poland “wants” to join NATO. In his eyes, we are just mindless pawns, dragged to NATO by Clinton, who “admitted” he did it solely for “domestic political reasons”."
https://eastsplaining.substack.com/p/about-the-nato-promise-to-gorbachev
"If you have found yourself at any point repeating narratives that, upon reflection, served Russian strategic interests - whether about NATO expansion, or energy policy, or refugee crises, or any of the dozens of other topics that have been systematically seeded - this does not reflect poorly on your intelligence.
"It reflects well on the engineering.
"These are state-level operations backed by institutional budgets, executed by professionals who have refined their methods across decades, deployed through channels specifically calibrated to your psychological profile, and anchored in genuine grievances and verified facts that give the overall narrative its protective armour of credibility."
https://waronomics.substack.com/p/a-field-guide-to-russian-propaganda
There it is again, the zombie ideology: any position which also happens to be consonant with some interest of Putin or Russia, or which has been explicitly taken up by them, is by definition one that has been engineered and not independently arrived at by its exponent. William Burns, George Kennan, John Mearsheimer - Russian stooges too?
The claim is the unfalsifiable gift that keeps on giving. There is no limit to the smearing and misrepresentation that can be accomplished with the charge. It was made against the civil rights movement, more recently against the Black Uhuru socialists in St. Louis, and it will continue to be made, it seems, until the end of time as a specious distortion.
NATO is a military alliance that is explicitly hostile to Russia. This is not hidden. It is absurd to suggest that it reluctantly subsumed additional countries under its umbrella since the Cold War. Even without knowing anything else, the very notion violates every known law of power and expansion from the origin of history.
Thank you for your thoughtful reply. I don’t have time to read all the links. The failure of thought I hinted at in my comment was that two things can be true at the same time: the Russian invasion can be a bad choice and the West’s provocations and response can also have been a bad choice. Almost without fail, defenses of NATO and the US get confused here. Apparently many Ukranians are also not “informed and honest observers”. Whether a talking point aligns with Russian strategic interests is irrelevant. The attitude that “Russia must be resisted at all cost” as an unquestionable starting point to any conversation is how the western discussion derailed so early on. The EU and Ukraine even criminalize dissent against this premise. The counter-argument usually again points out some irrelevant stuff about how Russian society isn’t free. By this logic, the Iraq War was justified because “Saddam Bad”.
Our next president needs to channel their inner Teddy Roosevelt. The capital class is out of control.
Nationalizing just means making the thing that is nationalized public. It's only difficult for people in the U.S. to conceive of doing this because of decades of being cauterized against any notion that doing it could not fail to be disastrous, and because a capitalist economy has been endowed with the aura of it being the default which only afterwards is to be rationally controlled, but to which society must defer in the first instance as if it were a law of nature. It is not a law of nature, and is not entitled to be assumed.
In the U.S., it seems always to require a "national security" issue to make nationalization, or any movement of society in a more humane direction, a live possibility, and for it to make sense, just like "gays in the military" was believed to be a prerequisite that must be satisfied before gay people could have unqualified equality. This is something to pay attention to: a right-wing or “centrist” imperialist aim or interest must always be coupled with something salutary in itself, and before reputed public intellectuals worried about losing their credibility, e.g., Paul Krugman, will opine on behalf of the thing that should be sought for its own sake.
It should not be controversial (but it is) to start from the proposition that certain public goods are not for sale - end of story - and then capitalism can have the remainder so long as it does not infringe on those public goods. What those public goods are is debatable, but it should include basically everything we need to live decently: housing, food, education, and health care right off the bat, but also libraries, parks, art, media, access to nature, and to the democratic process. One can think of others, but it does not require that the thing to be nationalized must be so-called "critical infrastructure".
This kind of publicly directed cultural and political reorientation must include limits on the quantity of wealth any one person can own or control, not just because it’s just and protects the commons, but because it is ludicrous to assert that any one person deserves more than that limit no matter what innovation they might have contributed. Wealth beyond that number just means that other people’s contributions are not being acknowledged, or are being stolen. I think that limit should be set much lower than most: $20,000,000 (that number should also be uncontroversial, but it isn't).
Really great piece, thank you so much.
As a “freeloader” I appreciate you stepping up and saying what my fellow citizens think of these “producers” and their concept of community, morality, equality, and humanity. May they never inherit the earth.
Some excerpts:
…”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.”
— "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.
“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.”
Hi Mike, I take your point and certainly critical infrastructure has a responsibility to the public. Meanwhile, I would hardly trust the Trump administration with the behemoth any more than Musk. As you state, 80% funding through government contracts should come with a lot of caveats and regulations. Both for-profit and not-for-profits like teaching/research hospitals and universities have to fill out massive applications for competitive grants and there are loads of regulations involved. I am not so sure ownership of Starlink by the federal government is as critical as higher levels of regulation and independent watchdog oversight.
Today’s corporations are small potatoes when compared to the East India Company. It conquered the Indian subcontinent with its army of 50,000, then taxed and suppressed the populace. It owned almost the entire dock works of London, the then-Financial Capital of the world. When France wanted to imprison Napoleon on the Isle of Saint Helena, it had to rent the island from the East India Company. When the British Parliament, which had more than a few members who were shareholders of the East India Company, decided no private company should set government policy, it began splitting up the East Indian Company and eventually dissolved it. Regulatory capture has its limits. Elon Musk has finally overreached far enough that both sides of the Congressional aisle have had enough of him. Gwen Shotwell is perfectly capable of running SpaceX and its various divisions. When the administration recovers from Porcupine Syndrome (pointing in all directions), Trump, Rubio, et alia will throw Musk under the bus. Somebody gave Putin a heads-up in re the coming slowdown of StarShield, and that somebody must pay the price.