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The New Yorker has a must-read piece on the many tentacles of Elon Musk, by the prodigious Ronan Farrow. We all know about Musk’s impulsive weirdness and economic reach. But did you know that the Ukrainian government, and thus the allied U.S. government, relies on Musk’s company SpaceX and its service Starlink for all battlefield communications in the Russia-Ukraine war? And that top Pentagon officials were reduced to begging the capricious Musk to cease cutting field communications as his own views (and self-interests) regarding Russia changed?
As Farrow writes, other tycoons throughout history have exercised immense influence; some, such as J.P. Morgan, even encouraged the government to rely on their private fortunes to support public policy. But, says Farrow, “There is little precedent for a civilian’s becoming the arbiter of a war between nations in such a granular way, or for the degree of dependency that the U.S. now has on Musk in a variety of fields, from the future of energy and transportation to the exploration of space.”
NASA currently relies on SpaceX for the transport of all NASA crews into space. And Musk has gotten the jump on installing proprietary charging stations for electric vehicles that work only with Teslas, which complicates the Biden administration’s policy on EVs.
There was a time when the Defense Department devised and operated its own communications equipment (the U.S. Army Signal Corps dates to 1860) and when NASA relied on contractors to build rockets but managed its own launches. For that matter, there was a time when students who attended public universities did not have to worry about debt or debt relief, because these universities were not public in name only—they were free.
Elsewhere on today’s Prospect site are pieces on abuses by investor-owned utilities and on the Biden administration’s mixed success in its efforts to restrain drug costs using authority granted by the Inflation Reduction Act. The remedy for the former is public power, a superior option that has been around for more than a century. And rather than trench warfare with Big Pharma, whose profits are heavily supported by government-funded research, government could produce drugs directly, as California has begun to do with generic prescription drugs.
The Prospect’s August print issue is all about abuses and inefficiencies in the private health care system. The only real solution, as other nations have demonstrated, is to cut the knot and turn to socialized medicine.
In many respects, public options are as American as apple pie; it’s extreme privatization that’s new. In other cases, we need to take systems that are partially public, such as Medicare and the VA, and make them comprehensive for the entire citizenry. Why not boot Musk and take back NASA control of rocket launches, not to mention battlefield signal technology?
Most of our great achievements, from land grant colleges to Social Security to public power, have been more socialistic than many liberals like to admit. It’s when these public systems get captured by capitalists that they fail.
