How to Botch Becoming “the Greatest Communist in History”

When a ruler jokes that he would be “the greatest communist in history” while the treasury buys into mines, reactors, and chip sales, I do not hear a joke. I hear a man testing how much new power the times will bear. The effectual truth is simple: the government has taken a 5 percent stake in a mining firm and its Nevada project, promised itself 20 percent of certain nuclear dividends, and even bargained for 15 percent of chip sales to China. All this is presented, through a press secretary, as a “creative solution” to a “crippling debt crisis.” Debt is the pretext; expanded dominion over wealth is the substance.

I learned in Florence that rulers facing fiscal strain always discover “creative solutions” that look remarkably like new modes of command over property. The name does not matter, the ownership does. If the state underwrites reactors for a share of dividends, or lets private merchants export to a rival in exchange for a cut, it is in effect making itself a silent partner in enterprises it does not manage but hopes to milk. This resembles neither open nationalization nor true laissez-faire; it is a creeping tutelage disguised as clever bookkeeping. Half a chain still binds the prisoner.

But even chains must be forged with virtù. Under one chip-export deal, we are told the treasury “should have received about $63 million” in a few months; it received nothing, because the administration “has yet to issue the necessary regulations to codify the profit-sharing arrangement amid questions about their legality.” Here fortune offers revenue, and the prince fails to build the legal dykes in time. When I compared fortune to a raging river in The Prince, W. K. Marriott’s translation made the point plain: floods destroy only where “barriers and defences have not been raised.” Here the waters arrive and the sluice gate is still on the drafting table.

This is not merely clumsiness; it is a reform without arms. When I spoke of arms in that little book, I meant not only soldiers but every instrument that defends new orders: clear laws, administrative teeth, loyal coalitions, and a judiciary that will not laugh them out of court. Instead, these profit-sharing schemes hang in the air, lacking regulations and shadowed by doubts about legality. A prince who wants the state to live off corporate dividends must begin by arming the policy with statutes and enforcement, not by treating the law as an afterthought. Unarmed prophets, I observed, always come to grief.

There is also the matter of appearance. To boast of being a great “communist” while groping toward state profit-sharing is a dangerous jest. Most people, as I wrote long ago, judge far more by the eye than by the hand; they see the jest, the swagger, the “creative solution,” and infer an intention to turn the republic into a shareholder of everything. Yet when the money fails to arrive because no one has written the rules, the appearance of audacity dissolves into the reality of confusion. Reputation, like credit, is strongest when it understates what one can actually collect. Here the spectacle races ahead of the substance, and both may pay.

Some will answer that these are only modest stakes, temporary measures for a “crippling” emergency, that legality questions show healthy restraint. I grant that necessity may push a republic to unusual arrangements; in corrupt times a rigid horror of all state involvement is as foolish as blind enthusiasm for it. But the pattern matters. To buy slices of companies, to bargain for revenue streams, and then to shrink from giving them firm legal form is the vice of the middle course. It provokes enemies of intervention without delivering the promised fiscal relief. You incur all the accusations of state capitalism with few of its resources.

In the Discourses I praised peoples who, distrusting rulers and themselves, built orders that assumed men “are bad, and will always, when they have free field, give loose to their evil inclinations,” as Ninian Hill Thomson translated me. A prudent people, seeing these equity experiments and stalled regulations, should ask: what prevents a future government from expanding these stakes, or from using them to reward friends and starve enemies? There is still time, we are told, to “change course before more deals go sideways.” I would say: either abandon this creeping partnership, or regularize it under strict, public law. For in politics, the middle course is usually just the longest road to the ditch.