CAPTIVE

$10,000 buys a brand-new BYD Seagull in Shanghai: a road-legal electric hatchback with the fit and finish of cars priced above $35,000 in America. In America, you cannot buy it at any price. Washington has stacked a 100 percent tariff on top of a 2.5 percent baseline duty, then added a connected-vehicle rule that bans its software outright. Officially, national security. The real reason is arithmetic, and the beneficiaries are nameable.

CAPTIVE is the receipt trail. Juan Rodulfo follows the same architecture through four closed markets: the car you cannot buy, the phone that was blacklisted, the insulin that sells for more than nine times its price in comparable countries, and the broadband pipe compromised through the backdoor the government ordered carriers to build. He shows how tariffs, blacklists, patent thickets, and dealer-franchise laws form one system of regulatory capture: a cartel enforced by law and marketed as protection.

Then he tests the security claim against the government's own record. Equifax lost the data of 147 million Americans through an unpatched server. OPM lost 22.1 million security-clearance files from an unencrypted database. SolarWinds let Russian intelligence into nine federal agencies for nine months. Salt Typhoon walked in through CALEA's lawful-intercept backdoor. A Secretary of Defense shared strike details in a chat with his wife. The institutions that cannot secure their own networks have appointed themselves the gatekeepers of your market.

Inside, you will find:

• The five-layer tariff wall that keeps cheap Chinese EVs out of America, and the six trade groups lobbying for it while demanding relief on their own imported parts.
• The FCC's Covered List, the TikTok restructure, and the patent paradox that has Huawei earning licensing fees from the companies that banned it.
• The 247-patent-application thicket behind Humira and the Canadian importation wall that keeps U.S. drug prices nine times higher.
• The twenty-year national-security audit that demolishes the competence argument for closure.
• The dynasty map, from Walton and Koch to Ford and Roberts, and the index-fund layer above them.

This book is for readers who suspect national security has become a pricing strategy, and want the documents and the names. For voters, founders, policy analysts, and anyone who has asked why the government that lost their Social Security number decides which car they can buy.

If the security record is this bad, on what authority does Washington close your market? CAPTIVE answers with evidence and names the beneficiaries.