Ezra

"Nationalize Starlink." Three words, 142K views. And the entire economic history of the 20th century screaming in the room. Let me explain what would actually happen. Start in 1920. Ludwig von Mises publishes an essay that will haunt every central planner: without private property, there are no market prices. Without prices, there is no way to calculate. A bureaucrat cannot know whether a ton of steel is more useful in a satellite or in a bridge. He guesses. He guesses wrong. And nobody pays when he's wrong. In 1945, Hayek drives the point home. The knowledge needed to run an economy doesn't exist in any single brain or any ministry. It's scattered across millions of people, and prices are the only mechanism that can aggregate it in real time. Centralize the decision and you destroy the information. This isn't theory. Look at the numbers. In the US, from 2000 to 2025, overall inflation was about +90%. Now look at the sectors where government subsidizes, regulates, and protects the most: hospital services +271%. College tuition +194%. Textbooks +181%. Childcare +152%. Medical care +144%. And the sectors exposed to competition? TVs: -97%. Software, toys, cell phone plans: all down in nominal terms over 25 years. The more the state is involved, the more expensive and scarce things get. The less it's involved, the more abundant they become. Space is the perfect example. NASA's Space Shuttle cost about $54,500 per kilo to low Earth orbit. Falcon 9: about $2,700. Twenty times cheaper. That's not my number, that's NASA's own study. A private company did in fifteen years what a government agency couldn't do in forty. Starlink is the logical next step. Thousands of satellites launched on reusable rockets. High-speed internet for a remote village, a ship in the middle of the Pacific, a soldier on the front line. No government built that. So you nationalize it. What happens? First, you have to pay. SpaceX is worth somewhere around $1.75 to $2 trillion, and seizing it requires just compensation. That's more than a full year of the US defense budget, to buy something that already works. Then the machine changes its objective function. Today it optimizes for cost, speed, iteration. Tomorrow it optimizes for budgets, procurement cycles, and subcontractors spread across as many states as possible to lock in congressional votes. We know how that ends: look at SLS, years late and billions over budget. When Starship blows up in a test, SpaceX learns and flies again. When a government agency loses a rocket, you get a commission of inquiry and years of paralysis. And the power? The argument is "no private individual should have this much power." But nationalization doesn't eliminate power. It hands it to whoever sits in the Oval Office. And one day, that will be the person you hate most. Here's what I deeply believe: humanity is figuring it out. The 20th century tested the state as the engine of value creation. The result: waiting lines, rents, and debt. The model that works is entrepreneurs with the people. Create value, offer it to people who are free to say no. And tear down everything that protects incumbents: rents, regulations that work as moats, patents that freeze innovation instead of rewarding it. Elon understood this before anyone else. Tesla opened up its patents in 2014. SpaceX broke ULA's near-monopoly (Boeing + Lockheed) on launches. Starlink is making decades of telecom rents obsolete. He isn't competing with the old system. He's setting a new standard. And when the new standard is twenty times cheaper, the old system doesn't reform. It disappears. That's exactly why some people want to nationalize it. When you can't compete, you confiscate. Nationalizing Starlink isn't taking back control. It's handing the future back to the system that already missed it.