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

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

In mid-April, Tennessee Governor Bill Lee signed a legislative resolution designating June “Nuclear Family Month.”

The purpose, naturally, was to grandstand on supposedly counter-acting the annual “Pride Month” celebrations of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and … well, I’m sure a few more adjectives have come along since I sat down to write this column, but I don’t know what they are … people that have become a fixture of US life over the last few decades.

Historically, though, the idea is just as “progressive” as “Pride Month,” and somewhat less historically grounded.

Here’s how the resolution begins:

“The nuclear family, consisting of one husband, one wife, and any biological, adopted, or fostered children, is God’s design for familial structure and has been the bedrock of society since the creation of the world.”

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that the resolution purports to be grounded in the Bible. Which, apparently, the legislators and the governor forgot to read before framing up that resolution.

The primary biblical Jewish family unit — the mishpachah or clan — was an “extended,” not “nuclear,” family. Everyone from grandparents to grandchildren to nieces, nephews, cousins, and servants lived in close proximity to each other under the supervision of  clan “patriarchs,” the alpha males of the family lines.

Globally, even outside of the biblical milieu, “extended family” units were the historial norm for millennia, for precisely the same reason that they’re less prevalent now: Economics.

The major forces that created the celebrated modern “nuclear family” were industrialization, urbanization, and prosperity.

As workers moved off of large, multi-generational feudal or family farms and into towns to work in factories and stores, their diversity of employment location, and therefore choice of where to reside, fragmented.

As they became more prosperous, they were able to acquire separate shelter for smaller groups — instead of ten people in a one-room apartment, it became three or four in a two BEDroom apartment, or perhaps a small house.

Then came the automobile, the freeway, and the suburb, at which point a young couple could, in relative (to, say, the Oregon Trail) ease, move across the country from their mothers and fathers while still expecting a reasonably comfortable lifestyle in their new environs.

The nostalgia for a 1950s “mom, dad, two kids, Chevy four-door, well-manicured lawn around a tidy cottage”  way of life is not nostalgia for “the old days,” let alone for the days shortly after “the creation of the world.” It’s nostalgia for post-World-War-2 Pasadena, California.

I see no particular reason anyone should begrudge Tennessee its own transformation — also centered around World War 2 — from a largely rural, agricultural economy to a more urban, industrial economy, with its neat suburbs and “nuclear family” arrangements.

But trying to put a moral spin on those arrangements, backdating and falsifying the history of humankind — and, to the extent we might think we know them, the decrees of God — to “own the libs” is at least as silly as the silliest “Pride Month” celebrations.

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