Confiscating AI
U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders (I–VT) claims that he’s introducing a bill to “give the public a direct ownership stake in the largest AI companies” because AI was built on “collective human intelligence” that “has been stolen by Big Tech oligarchs.”
IN FACT, Sanders is using false pretenses and bait-and-switch tactics to seize the means of production, which he declared he no longer supports and is associated with sweeping poverty. Here are the specifics:
- In the 1970s and 1980s — before Sanders was elected to national office — he explicitly and repeatedly called for government to seize large sectors of the economy, including “banks and major industries,” “gigantic” energy companies like “Exxon,” “drug companies,” “private electric companies without compensation to the banks and wealthy stockholders who own the vast majority of stock in these companies,” and all “the major means of production.”
- Under that system of socialism, which existed at that time in the Soviet Union, the standard of living was “roughly one third that of the United States.”
- When Sanders ran for president in 2015, he did an about-face on pure socialism and declared, “I don’t believe government should own the means of production.”
- Sanders says that his AI bill will ensure that “AI works for ALL,” but it would actually authorize the “federal government” to effectively seize control of the “largest AI companies in the U.S.” through a “one-time 50% tax” of their “stock.”
- The Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution prohibits government from taking “private property” for “public use, without just compensation.”
- Sanders alleges that his actions are justified because “artificial intelligence is being built on” the “accumulated knowledge, creativity, and labor of humanity,” and the “time has come for us to reclaim what was stolen from us.”
- In the United States, government doesn’t own the output of humanity but is “instituted” to “secure” their God-given “unalienable Rights,” such as “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
- Unless someone violates copyright and patent laws or engages in plagiarism, making use of public knowledge isn’t stealing but the typical means of technological and societal advancement.
- Under Sanders’ bait-and-switches of “humanity” for “government” and “knowledge” for “stealing,” government would be entitled to steal everything from everyone, just like in Communist countries throughout the world.
- Sanders asserts that his “concept” already “exists right here in the United States” because Alaska has a “sovereign wealth fund from the state’s oil revenues” that pays “dividends directly to Alaskans.”
- The Alaska Permanent Fund is financed by “royalties that oil and natural gas producers pay to produce on leased state lands,” not by seizing private assets.
- The Alaska Permanent Fund is used to reduce taxes, while Sanders wants to use the confiscated AI stocks to expand government funding of “healthcare, education, and housing.”
- PolitiFact claims it is “false” that Sanders and Zohran Mamdani are “communists,” but their stated positions accord with the defining economic policies of the Soviet Union.
- Contrary to Sanders and Mamdani, the founders of the U.S. explicitly rejected “a pure democracy” where a majority can seize private property and use the power of government to do most anything they want.
- Conversely, the Soviets demanded a mobocracy and approvingly called it “the dictatorship of the proletariat, a new Soviet democracy for all the toilers.”
