US president Donald Trump, Reuters reports, is “looking into” a US government stake in leading artificial intelligence firms. “There’s something very interesting about it, where it almost becomes a partnership with the American public,” Trump says.

This isn’t his first such initiative. Since beginning his second term, Trump has announced 15 such “equity stake” deals between the US government and various companies, at least ten of which have so far been formally consummated.

This time, though, his logic differs somewhat. He’s justified previous “equity stake” agreements on alleged national security concerns and on a supposed economic need to create jobs by “reshoring” industries which have moved production to other countries in recent decades.

This particular proposal feels more like the basis for some kind of “Universal Basic Income” scheme, or at least for funding increased welfare state entitlements, and doesn’t seem to differ markedly from a proposal by openly “socialist” US Senator Bernie Sanders (D-VT) to seize equity in AI firms for a “Sovereign Wealth Fund.”

So, let’s talk about Trump and “socialism.”

“Socialism,” he said in a 2019 speech, “promises prosperity but delivers poverty. Socialism promises unity but delivers hate and division. Socialism promises a better future, but always returns to the darkest chapters of the past.”

“Socialism” suffers from too many, and too incompatible, definitions — ranging from direct worker ownership of businesses, to welfare statism financed through heavy taxation of those businesses, to the government ownership of  those business as a supposed proxy for those workers — but Trump’s points are fair ones with regard to, at least, the latter two types.

Yet Trump frequently argues those points with himself … and loses, agreeing that he was wrong in that speech. When it comes to actual policy, he’s arguably the most “socialist” American president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt, even exceeding FDR in some areas.

During COVID, he launched a socialist scheme to develop and deploy a vaccine. Early on, he temporarily invoked what the Russian Bolsheviks called “war communism,” using the Defense Production Act to temporarily nationalize several companies for production of ventilators (that ended when it turned out the market had solved the problem quickly and efficiently without such “help”). And of course we all remember the budget-busting  “stimulus” checks and “payroll protection” loans.

During both of his terms, he’s tried to cover up the devastating effects of his tariff schemes with handouts and bailouts for the worst victims of those effects, like farmers who saw world markets for their goods virtually disappear overnight.

By virtually any metric, Trump is devoted to central economic planning and government control of American industry.  To, that is, socialism.

What separates him from other, actually admitted, socialists like Sanders and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani isn’t that they’re any more or less committed to “socialism,” it’s the specific TYPE of socialism.

As “democratic socialists,” Sanders and Mamdani focus on a class warfare theory in which wealth needs to be redistributed from a capitalist “owner” class to an exploited “worker” class. It’s a dumb theory, with exactly the same effects as those described in Trump’s speech.

Trump, on the other hand, is a “national socialist” (you may have seen that term elsewhere; I won’t belabor the implication). His theory is less about internal economic class divisions than about a collectivist imagining of the “nation” as an indivisible unit. It’s not “the workers” who are exploited by “capitalists,” it’s “the nation” which is exploited by, and requires protection from, foreigners who make cheaper and/or better widgets of this or that kind.

Those seemingly different “socialisms” historically lead to the same results. Trump’s version is no exception.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

It may be 64 years after the New York Mets losing 120 baseball matches in their debut season led manager Casey Stengel to plead “Can’t anyone here play this game?” Yet The Wall Street Journal columnist William A. Galston notes that the same question could still apply to another “two monumentally inept teams.”

He doesn’t have in mind the Chicago White Sox, whose 121-loss season in 2024 led first-year Met Ed Kranepool to confess to the Journal that  “I feel sorry for them,” or the Colorado Rockies beating the equally longstanding Mets record for rock-bottom run differential last year.  Instead, Galston has in mind the Democrats and Republicans, “Capitol Hill’s Unlovable Losers” (May 27).

Less than two full years after the 2024 presidential election, Galston has merely to nod at the former party’s abject failure to learn from their loss, and the latter’s squandering of what little momentum remains from their win. UCLA School of Law professor Stephen Bainbridge adds: “at least we’re better off than the UK, which has about half-a-dozen incompetent teams.”

The iconic cinematic line from WarGames about it being “a strange game” if logic dictates that “the only winning move is not to play” applies not only to nuclear war, but the nuclear-option scorched-earth tactics that increasingly dominate electoral and cultural wars. While the suggested alternative of “a nice game of chess” offers at least a level playing field and an even chance to win — and even the most underdog of sports teams at least have some real if slim possibility of an upset — all-encompassing politicization fares even worse than such comparison implies.

After all, the psychological investment into two-sided competitive games isn’t quite as zero-sum as the scoring suggests. John Astin’s Dr. Gangreen in the Attack of the Killer Tomatoes animated episode “The Great Tomato Wars” finds “the agony of defeat” to be as appealing as “the thrill of victory” — as he also puts it: “I hate ties! I like winners and losers” — and one need not go that far to appreciate a well-played contest. Affairs of state divert resources from win-win voluntary deals to sports arenas whose business doesn’t need them to earn consumer dollars, and other battlegrounds where the vintage 2004 Alien vs. Predator tagline “whoever wins … we lose.” perpetually applies to a closer-to-home species of space invaders.

For a less unlovable political loser, Galston could have turned to Jimmy Breslin, the author of a book about the 1962 Mets named after Stengel’s remark. While Kranepool helped take his team from last place to triumph in the 1969 World Series, Breslin finished in penultimate place as Norman Mailer’s running mate for NYC mayor.

Observing that “the last thing that New York can afford at this time is a politician thinking in normal politicians’ terms,” Breslin offered not just a long-shot chance of change at the top (Mailer optimistically estimated a chance of winning the race around 5%) but the promise of moving much of daily life to local community decision-making by neighbors — and so out of the control of elected, and unelected, officials entirely.

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

As I write this column, Florida legislators are hard at work on a measure to eliminate property taxes in the state.

Really? No. But it’s forgivable to have believed that based on clickbait headlines and the wailing of county-level politicians.

What legislators actually have in front of them is a November ballot measure proposal that would

1) ask the state’s voters if they want to

2) increase the amount of the state’s so-called “homestead exemption.”

The  “homestead exemption” means that a homeowner doesn’t pay property tax on the first $X of assessed value on his or her primary residence. It doesn’t apply to second homes. It doesn’t apply to commercial properties. Just the one house you call home.

Right now, the Florida homestead exemption amount is $50,000. The proposal would raise that to $250,000.

Before going any further, let me acknowledge both my personal interest (my family recently bought a house, and the proposal would save us a LOT of money) and one likely down side of the proposal (since apartments and rental homes are commercial properties, they’d continue to be taxed, possibly at a higher rate, which would drive up rents for non-homeowners).

Now, let’s talk about the $50,000 versus $250,000 amounts. The former was established in 2008.

On a little AI-assisted searching, I find that average assessed Florida home values have increased by about 150% since 2008, and that there now about 2 million more homes in Florida than there were in 2008. In other words, a lot more homeowners are paying a lot more in property taxes than used to be the case.

In the meantime, average wages have only increased by about 35%, while inflation has driven up the prices of things Floridians buy by 75%. Which means those increased tax bills have become less affordable, even as county government budgets have continued to grow at or faster than the inflation rate. The state government has run budget surpluses since 2010.

It seems to me that SOME kind of correction is in order. Government keeps taking, and spending, more of our money, but our earnings aren’t keeping up with either that government growth or the cost of living.

To which the standard reply is that “government services will have to be cut.”

Which services?

Well, Alachua County’s government complains that it may not have enough money for “permitting and code enforcement.”

I consider that a feature, not a bug. The county demands thousands of dollars in rent (that’s what property tax basically amounts to) from my family every year … then considers it a “service” to make us bow and scrape for permission, and pay an additional bribe, for the privilege of putting, at our own expense, a shed or above-ground pool on property it says we “own.”

We’re also told that fire/rescue/police/schools, and other “essential services,” might have to be scaled back … but even if we convince ourselves those can’t be handled by the private sector, there’s no particular reason to believe that their size and cost absolutely, positively must scale ever upward, while the rest of us tighten our belts.

The alternatives on offer, should the proposal pass, all seem to be about finding ways to raise other existing taxes or impose new ones. Sales taxes, for example, which do tend to hit lower-income families harder. Or tourism-targeted taxes, which can kill that golden goose if overdone, and which are the first revenue sources to take a hit in a recession.

There’s another option, the one that’s always, under any plausible circumstance, best: Cut government spending. Even most non-anarchists understand that we suffer from FAR too much government. The best way to fix that is to stop over-funding it.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY