In a recent New York Times guest essay, Vermont Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders called for the U.S. government to acquire a 50% stake in all American artificial intelligence companies. Recognizing that the burgeoning technology will revolutionize the world as we know it, Sanders loathes the idea of AI being outside the direct control of the federal government.

Equating AI with a public commodity, Sanders argues against the false dichotomy that AI is owned by a few billionaires, who thereby exert undue control over the future of American society. Sanders invokes democracy to justify bureaucratic control over the developing commodity, arguing that AI should ultimately be controlled by those who did absolutely nothing to create or build it.

That’s because, to Sanders, socialism, which has failed everywhere it has been implemented, is the solution to bringing about a more just society. Unfortunately, history repeatedly shows that socialism is merely an excuse for some other elitist class to claim control and ownership of everything in society, with the nonsense excuse that they should do so because they have the concern of the people at heart.

Recognizing that AI’s development is dependent upon people using the technology, which adds input and knowledge to it, Sanders erroneously concludes that, therefore, the only way humanity will “equally” and “fairly” benefit from AI is to prevent it from being owned and controlled by a few billionaires like Elon Musk or Sam Altman. Never mind that they are the ones footing the bill, investing billions of their own dollars to see the technology developed.

Furthermore, like the ignorant socialist that he is, Sanders ignores the fact that society collectively benefits more from technologies developed by capitalist private enterprise because they afford consumers more choice, wider availability, and overall efficiency than any top-down government program ever has.

That’s because competition incentivized by financial reward produces greater technological development than infinitely more costly government-run enterprises. Furthermore, government control inevitably introduces additional political aims and corruption.

Sanders, of course, ignores all this reality and simply points to the massive wealth gap between average folks and these Big Tech entrepreneurs, as if that were evidence enough to prove his claim that government ownership and control will make things fairer.

In this vein, Sanders is introducing his American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act, which he notes “would give the public a direct ownership stake in the largest A.I. companies in our country.” He asserts, “It would create a sovereign wealth fund through a one-time 50 percent tax — not on the profits of OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI and other companies, but paid with something far more valuable than that: the stock.”

Then he argues, “The federal government would have the power, through its voting shares and an equal representation on each company’s board, to block decisions that hurt our citizens and to push for policies that help them.” Decisions like what?

Will the federal government not have a role in regulating this new AI industry, as it does with all others?

For Sanders, it’s not enough that the federal government exerts regulatory authority over the industry; it must also take massive amounts of revenue from these companies in the name of welfare. Socialism.

As he writes, “This legislation would guarantee that the trillions of dollars potentially generated by A.I. are used to improve the lives of all of us — not simply to make the richest people in the world even richer. If the big A.I. companies continue to grow as rapidly as many analysts expect, then the value of the sovereign wealth fund will grow as well — and the benefits to the American people will grow along with it.”

There it is: socialist wealth-redistribution. Take from the productive to give to the unproductive and call it “fairness.” This is a recipe for destroying economic growth by injecting politically motivated roadblocks to technological development within the AI industry.

Sanders equates AI technology to a national commodity like oil, arguing, “When a public resource generates wealth, the public should share in that wealth. A.I. is being built on a public resource far more valuable than oil: the accumulated knowledge, creativity and labor of mankind.” But the public benefits from oil are not due to it being a publicly owned resource; rather, they stem from companies investing capital to develop the resource in response to public consumer demand. If it weren’t for this reality, the massive oil industry would never have developed into what it is today.

Those nations that treat oil as a public resource can do so only because high demand for the resource exists in free-market societies.

Federal AI would only hamper development and ensure that our biggest geopolitical foe, China, catches up and surpasses American development of the new technology. But maybe that’s what Sanders wants. He’s always been a fan of communism, after all.