That’ll Teach the Socialists!

Inevitably, the news comes that the Trump administration is deeply engaged in negotations aimed at establishing “a long-term stake in a vast share of Venezuela’s oil fields.” That is, a long-term U.S. Government ownership stake in Venezuela’s natural resources. So Trump invades a socialist country and deposes its leader, only to come to terms with the rest of the socialist regime at the expense of its opposition, and then to use his leverage with that country’s political establishment to gain “long-term” American government control of the country’s means of production. That’ll really teach the socialists a thing or two about free markets!

This, of course, is the same Donald Trump who, during the 2009 financial crisis, when asked about his stand on the infamous bailouts for major U.S. corporations, took a position far to the Marxist left of that Bush-era folly, stating on CNN that in the name of stabilizing the economy, he would even be in favor of nationalizing the banks.

It is the same Trump who has forcibly taken a substantial ownership stake in many American companies, most notoriously the tech giant Nvidia, and is even now aggressively seeking to expand this state invasion of private industry. 

Far from being the bulwark against America’s communists within, as Trump’s benighted supporters continually tell themselves he is, Trump is in truth doing much of the heavy-lifting for the radicals, establishing the legal and economic precedents for a nationalized economy, and dismantling the moral guardrails against state intervention and the dissolution of the very notion of private property ownership.

Needless to say, a man with such disdain for freedom and property rights will show, and has shown, about as much temperamental reservation regarding the implications and machinations of the “data-collection” methods of artificial intelligence companies as, say, Xi Jinping does. Notice anything odd about that psychological similarity, Trumpsters? That’s fine, I suppose; Trump wouldn’t notice anything odd about it either.