I know many here would scoff at nationalizing a private company, but AI is a usurpation of human knowledge and quite literally at times. (Every AI company was embroiled in copyright lawsuits and lord knows what Qwen et al are up to.)
In turn, everyone knows labor displacement is coming. My bet is the next recession will end up being brutal for this reason. To me, labor displacement and the social consequences are a potentially *catastrophic* negative externality. Should not there be a tax to offset the "frictional" unemployment? What happens when people lose a high skill job and will no longer be able to afford their mortgage?
Also, why are people always talking about AI as if its an angel or satan? The degree to which we're doomed is an open question, much like a tornado... so why aren't we thinking about taxes on AI like a tornado insurance fund?
What % of Americans would agree to that. 10%?
I agree for those of us in the field, we are a lot more confident. But I dont think my retired parents have any idea what AI is or have ever touched anything more complicated than Alexia.
Tech will also probably come under attack from two directions. It's not only from labor replacement, but also from a decrease in the value of tech. Right now competition in tech is limited by the relatively large barrier to entry to writing even simple programs. As that barrier disappears, the baseline value of tech will likely decline sharply.
And let's please not have any lazy, low-effort replies claiming that AI will somehow magically eliminate all jobs for humans.
> And let's please not have any lazy, low-effort replies claiming that AI will somehow magically eliminate all jobs for humans.
I don't think AI actually capable of doing so, but AI companies need to stop bragging about wanting to do this and making it their goal if you don't want people to keep bringing it up.
Source? Specifics? This doesn't even sound plausible at face value. Even if it is somehow true, higher paying white collar jobs being replaced with service jobs that pay far less and have way worse conditions is not a positive or even a neutral outcome.
> The people getting rich off AI have to spend their money somewhere.
The amount of wealth hoarding already going on says otherwise. Buying yachts and islands does not magically offset millions of jobs being lost.
That's demonstrably false.
If it were remotely true, trickle down economics would have been a gold rush for the entire economy.
I think a lot of HN users still somehow don't understand the "lump of labor" fallacy.
https://www.stlouisfed.org/publications/page-one-economics/2...
Do you honestly believe there will be enough constant construction on data centers to replace millions of jobs lost to AI? Even if that was somehow true, there are tons of people that are not capable for one reason or another (age, physical fitness, etc) of doing construction work. Construction work also pays significantly less than many of the jobs being lost as is, so it's not a good replacement in that regard. And what happens when construction gets further streamlined and/or automated and requires fewer people? Or none at all, in the future?
Even your most optimistic hypothetical scenario results in millions of people doing hard manual labor for poverty wages. If anything, this just strengthens the case against AI and AI companies.
Speculation about science fiction automation scenarios is not a sound basis for public policy. Lots of things could happen in the future. We can't reasonably plan ahead for all possible contingencies.
This is essentially what a handful of c-suite execs have been telling the world for the past 2-3 years is it not?
Furthermore, AI companies and consulting companies themselves are selling this idea that it will completely reshape employment.
I find it more hand-wavey to say "it's just another technology change" than it is to say "this time it's different".
But most of the people creating digital media like animation, graphic art, and special effects are probably screwed. The next few years are going to be tough for them and they have my sympathies, but they're only a tiny fraction of the labor force.
* Investors are committing to keeping their money over a 10 year period, and you pay them dividends
* At the end of the 10 years you can withdraw it all, or keep your stock but withdraw the dividends, or keep your stock and reinvest the dividends for the next 10 years.
* Companies cannot be on any other type of "stock market"
* Companies need to be identified as producing something of significant value, like SpaceX's rockets would qualify.
* It can be part of anyone's 401k since these companies would be scrutinized.
Ideally a social media only company would NEVER qualify. I think the stock market is too happy to buy and sell, when some of these companies are a long term investment that has slowly paid off in ways most people cannot fathom or comprehend including healthcare discoveries.
The funny thing about AI is that the LLMs were trained by stomping on private property rights, being the intellectual rights holders of songs, books, movies, etc plus the troves of user-generated content, something for which they see no benefit.
Why are private property rights so important for AI companies but the private property rights of the training data aren't important at all?
I can tell you why: people on HN aren't authors or musicians. They are however software engineers who see themselves as profiting from the AI bubble.
Put another way: it's not that they care about private property rights. They simply think they can get rich enough so the problems won't apply to them.
FTA: "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."
Article 1, Section 8 has the general taxation clause:
> The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;
but Section 9 has the apportionment clause:
> No Capitation, or other direct, Tax shall be laid, unless in Proportion to the Census or enumeration herein before directed to be taken.
The term "direct tax" isn't fully explained, but it's generally been held that taxes on property (including wealth) would classify as a direct tax. Congress imposed an income tax, but SCOTUS said in Pollock v Farmer's Loan & Trust Co that a tax on rental income is effectively a property tax, and so must be apportioned.
The 16th Amendment was enacted specifically to overrule the Pollock decision, and allowed for income taxes to not have to be apportioned. In many respects, it's probably unnecessary because even without it, it's probably fairly likely that Pollock would have been overruled as just being bonkers reasoning anyways.
The plan Bernie Sanders is proposing is clearly stated in TFA, which is to take 50% of shares as a one-time tax, not as a purchase.
Absolutely not. That's like taxing shovels because people were digging with their hands. The result is just more people having to dig with their hands, the fact that 7/8ths of people who now dig with their hands will starve because shovels have been introduced is a choice that we are making. We are choosing not to feed them.
Creating an unnecessary pretense so that they can suffer before they are fed is psychotic. Pay them to go to school or to show up to healthcare appointments, not to do work that can be automated away.
I agree that labor displacement (and wage suppression) is in fact the only AI product. IN a just society, automation (more generally than AI) would allow people to work less. But we all know that it just means further wealth concentration and inequality.
And as material conditions worsen, society will increasingly rip itself apart. Populism will lead people to blame various out-groups for their woes because there'll be no opposition to it. It's why in the year of our Lord 2026, we have concentration camps again. Some call that term hyperbolic given the association with the HOlocaust. These people don't know history. Concentration camps were originally deportation camps [1].
I keep bringing up municipal broadband as an example of how people who hate "communism" both like their output and it's always better than national ISPs. And you know who else believes in public ownership? The US Department of Defense [2].
[1]: https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/deportatio...
[2]: https://investorplace.com/dailylive/2026/06/the-pentagon-is-...
Government spending is already ~40% of GDP.
And what do we get with this half?
A sovereign wealth fund? That seems like a great tool for a certain corrupt politician to use as a carrot to make CEO's bend to his/her whims.
What benefit does that have for anyone else?
You can't build a sovereign wealth fund if you're transferring all the money out. That's just more government spending, not a wealth fund...
Norway's oil fund is another famous example mentioned in the article.[1]
[0]: https://apfc.org/
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Pension_Fund_of_Nor...
These AI companies are on American land.
By contrast, data centers are generally going to be on land owned by the operator, and corporate offices are either owned by the company or leased to the company by some commercial real estate operator you've probably never heard of. In neither sense are they on land owned by any local, state, or federal government.
you mean as the people/voters wills it. Private ownership of land is pretty sacred law in the US, I don't see those laws being changed any time soon. Even logical things like the concept of eminent domain is very controversial.
I guess it's only ok when the government arbitrarily seizes half my paycheck. If it happens to billionaires it's communism or something.
Because I hate to break it to you, they could have zero drop in quality by just not incorporating US data...
If we're talking about copyright, why are we somehow entitled to profits derived from stealing Taylor Swift's IP? Why do you get a cut of AI derivatives and not get half of her wealth, too, directly?
Microsoft has trained models entirely on synthetic and public data with SotA results.
Also, much of the data used to train LLMs are not strictly public domain. For example, copyrighted books and source code with attribution-requiring licenses feature heavily in many corpuses. There are still pending lawsuits against the labs here, yet they continue to push forward. It’s no surprise that there is popular demand for redistribution.
It was 1 part of an observation of opposed forces. “On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.”[1]
Some people removed the context and used it to say most information should be available to all. LLMs are information.
You thought this question proved what?
Don't fall for the great lie of intellectual "property".
> A sovereign wealth fund? That seems like a great tool for a certain corrupt politician to use as a carrot to make CEO's bend to his/her whims.
Use the sovereign wealth fund to reduce income taxes. Other countries manage to run wealth funds without corruption. If a country can't do it then, I hate to break it to you, it's definitely not the fund's fault.
> Why half of AI and not half of Walmart & Exxon & Apple?
Good question. The answer: a more broad-based wealth tax, in the form of assets which go into a sovereign wealth fund, is probably the only way to make the long-term pension math work out in developed countries. You can only tax labor so much when capital actually has the most growth.
No? Then that’s probably why not, don’t you think?
I think the 50% number is a stake in the ground, period. A starting point for the discussion.
Why not Walmart? That's a great idea. Many companies, including Walmart, pay their employees so little that they qualify for Medicaid and other social benefits even though they're working full-time.
One of the primary methods of building wealth in this country is through stock ownership. Instead of being a wage slave, only making money based on your labor, with a stock tax on a company, the growth of that company's stock benefits everyone in the country directly, rather than just the moneyed few.
> A sovereign wealth fund? That seems like a great tool for a certain corrupt politician to use as a carrot to make CEO's bend to his/her whims.
That is a risk with an administration like the current one, but if the sovereign fund was ethically managed by an independent department, that wouldn't be an issue. The rest of the world has sovereign wealth funds, and you can find some good examples of how to do it right.
> What benefit does that have for anyone else?
How do you benefit with a 401k owning stock? What works for one should work for the other.
> You can't build a sovereign wealth fund if you're transferring all the money out. That's just more government spending, not a wealth fund.
How does any sovereign wealth fund increase its value? Proper planning, spending only dividends and not principal. Also, the sovereign wealth fund would continue to acquire stock whenever any company issues new stock. The fund would get 50% of those shares.
If one were to make it an active fund, the government has enough insider knowledge to know when to buy, sell, and short stocks. What? Using insider knowledge is unfair, you say? Why shouldn't the government play by the same rules as the rest of the finance industry? It's only us retail investors that have less-than-optimal returns because of insufficient knowledge.
> Let us be clear. Artificial intelligence was not created out of thin air. The data and language used by generative A.I. tools didn’t just pop into Sam Altman’s head or Elon Musk’s imagination. A.I. is built on our collective intelligence: our books, songs, artwork, journalism, computer code, scientific research, videos, conversations, images and ideas spanning generations.
Given the sheer volume of information posted to the Internet in the last 40-50 years, I'd wager that covers 80% or more of the relevant input data.
Old text is relatively scarce in the grand scheme of things.
But I have no real clue, just spitballing.
No they weren't. Copyright at this point covers things for at least half a dozen generations back, and is intentionally made annoying enough that it is difficult to find out what is covered and what isn't. LLM companies didn't bother with any of that (they just pirated like your average online 13 year old), meanwhile archive.org got sued for pulling the music off ancient wax cylinders.
Clean up and dramatically shorten, restrict, or even eliminate copyright, and we can start talking about what's fair game or not. People were afraid to sing "Happy Birthday" in movies for probably 80 years, and the corporations that own all IP made it very clear at the time that they preferred for the status of "Happy Birthday" to remain unclear, and would send you a scary letter if you used it.
> probably going to depend on whether AI is a transformative use.
It's probably going to be entirely political, and decided through corruption. It's obviously a mechanical transformation. If rap DJ's got sued for cramming songs full of 80 extremely manipulated samples that you'd need a forensics expert to trace, and all sampled music had to revert to a form where they'd license a single song and re-release it with somebody rapping over it, LLMs are a violation. DJ's were doing an absolutely creative translation, and LLMs are not creative, they are Δ-following pinball machines.
This is basically making that point with AI companies as their true influence is rapidly increasing. The rhetorical strategy here is to hook socialist ideas onto something people are already thinking about, a land-and-expand rhetorical strategy.
Personally I'm against the proposal, but the details are not the point because it's not going happen in this form. It's about changing minds first, then changing policy down the road.
Taking ownership of these companies is a Bernie thing not a Trump thing, but a sovereign wealth fund is used to pay off national debt.
You won't have any "wealth" if you use it.
That's just taxing and spending...
Perhaps you don't agree with him, although I would note that it's pretty rare for Bernie Sanders to agree with billionaires about how important something they've invented is! But if you don't take people seriously when they say they think AI is the most important thing that's happened in our lifetime, you're going to be endlessly confused when they act according to that belief.
I yeeted my Reddit account as soon as I learned it was being used, without my consent, to train AI. I now have regrets, that I didn't delete all my comments there recursively first. However, because everything I posted there (and I posted quite a bit!) is part of the training data, it's interesting to know that every future AI is going to have a little bit of my resistance to authority, and lateral thinking, and just a bit of uppity in it, because of me. ;-)
So, to yank part of the profits from our stolen soul back, via a TAX, seems quite reasonable to this Citizen of the United States. No money going out, just asserting authority, and collecting something on behalf of all of us, is a brilliant strategy for offsetting part of the theft they did first.
When did public ownership mean that the government needed to be the owner? And when did we start to allow companies to float so few shares that public shareholder voting rights became largely meaningless?
Concentrated ownership of the wealthy is not synonymous with “the public.” You are very literally arguing for plutocracy over democracy.
Valid point. I'd propose that if the government owns anything it only gets non-voting shares. And it should never own a controlling share of anything.
> And when he government needs money, they often sell at stupid prices.
I'd apply some kind of indexing algorithm. Leaving it to individual managers is bound to lead to corruption.
Obviously the current stakeholders hate losing control and wealth, but that's not the biggest issue.
Senator Sander's goal is not for some vast public to share the wealth, but for the government to have a veto on what gets done, to limit the collateral damage/exported costs. That's a classical government function.
However, the record of regulatory capture is nearly perfect, so it's likely the reverse would be achieved: the government-sponsored providers being a required intermediary in all knowledge work, with a corresponding incentive to seize those reins.
The probabilistic range of possibilities looks bleak: Now that all regulatory or quasi-governmental agencies of any import (Fed, FDA, EPA, Congress, Courts, CPB) have demonstrated remarkable plasticity to political whim, one would anticipate the worst would come of creating a political franchise out of fighting for control over AI; it would corrupt other aspects of politics.
I assume not enough politicians in this senator's camp were given their early cut so this is retribution/a lesson to the abstract "Big Tech" to show that DC is still the city that rules the world.
If the models were built using the output of all of human effort over time, then society at large should absolutely have a voice in the direction of the companies.
This tech should be made for public benefit, not for purely profit and private interests.
Quite frankly, most companies should be worker co-ops instead, and its long passed time we start moving to that model.
The models just take the same information available to anyone and make it more useful, it's not like oil or mining where it's a consumable that people share, nor is it taking from the youth- in fact it's one of the best ways of utilizing the knowledge of the past.
Honestly, the a lot of the people I hear complaining about having a "voice" about "output of all of human effort over time" are usually not the ones who put the information out on the web/books, as they are usually doing it for the benefit of future humans and not for profit. Seems to be the same as PMs or VCs trying to "capture the value" of other people.
Not really, no. Ownership gets you a share of the profits and profits can be used to reduce income taxes. I think non-voting is wise. It prevents political and partisan meddling.
Imo this proposal is even worse than a billionaire wealth tax (which has all sorts of implementation issues).
We will all own half, just not the good half.
I say this as a conservative leaning libertarian even.
I feel like I’m going crazy sometimes. Over the next few years we will see the biggest change to employment our country has ever seen. Our entire financial structure is about to be upended, and not a single politician is talking about it. It’s so weird that all I think about is AI, yet not a single politician seems to notice. (Or maybe they do and that’s why they’re pillaging the country.)
We live in a world where "creating value" (doing things that others find helpful) and "capturing value" (getting those people to pay you money) are two different things. If I give my mom a hug, I'm creating value, but that's not necessarily something I'm going to charge her for it. Most value created by people won't ever be captured. And that's a good thing imo.
It keeps the world moving, removes friction, and allows for authenticity. There's nothing wrong with wanting to capture value, of course. But the second you do that, you're a business. And "capturing value" has a huge set of tasks and responsibilities you now have to handle.
But there's an intuition that has gradually built up over centuries, alongside the growth of "intellectual property" as a concept. It's best paraphrased as, "I want to be compensated for the value I create, without doing any of the work to capture it. And if someone else finds an ingenious way to capture some of the value that I've created, then they should pay me."
To some degree, I understand and agree with the sentiment.
Nothing is built in a vacuum. No person or company is an island. Everything is built on top of public infrastructure and works created by the country, laid by our forefathers. This is just one of many reasons why I believe in a progressive tax system. To the extent that you're able to capture large amounts of value in America, a lot of that is made possible by the infra you're building on top of, which is owned by the public, and a progressive tax system is a good way to to share that with the public.
(Of course, this has its own problems, bc the government collecting taxes is not enough, it has to spend those funds wisely, for the benefit of all. Which it obviously doesn't do, at the federal level, or at many state and city levels. So I've always found it a bit perplexing for people to clamor for more taxation while caring little about how tax revenues are spent. But that's a discussion for another time.)
But overall, I don't like this intuition, because it's essentially rent-seeking behavior.
Capturing value is hard. Simply creating value is not enough. If you write a song, or you build an app, or you cook a meal, you still have all your work ahead of you to find a customer/consumer, and understand what they find valuable enough to pay for, and ensure your offering matches that, and do the marketing/sales to get it in front of them, and convince them to pay, and scale to more people, and manage your books, and do all of this profitably.
Expecting to be paid for simply creating value but doing none of the work to capture the value to me feels a little bit entitled. Or, at the very least, naive.
What's interesting is that certain industries have more or less entitlement here, depending on the influence of "intellectual property" in that industry.
For example, there's almost no concept of intellectual property in the cooking. If you invent a new recipe, you can't really patent it and tell everybody else that they're not allowed to make it. So, pretty much every chef is okay with the fact that they need to actually capture value by opening a restaurant or going to work for one.
It's similar in the software industry, where rather than patenting all of our software and trying to enforce it, we generally do the opposite and release software in an open-source way. We're quite aware that if we want to profit, we'll need to start our own startup, and we have no qualms with that.
But with writing, music, etc., you see a lot more creators who want to just do the creation part, who don't want to do the business part, but who then want the profits that the business part enables.
I can empathize for sure, I get it. But I think a world with less rent-seeking behavior is better. A world where more people understand what it takes to capture value and are willing to do it (or happy to just not do it) is a better world. A world where more people feel entitled to the profits earned by those who are able to capture value, I think, is worse.
We haven't gotten to where we are in the world today by giving the wealthy huge permanent advantages. Look at the explosion in innovation that has happened since public education has become widespread. It used to be only the wealthy that could afford to be educated. Part of what makes capitalism work at all is by not allowing the means to capture value to be monopolized.
Copyright benefits huge corporations way more than "the little guy." The biggest holders of copyrights and patents are huge corporations, many of which are often bought explicitly for the purpose of warding off competition from new upstarts.
These huge companies (e.g. Disney) also use their massive war chests to lobby the government into extending copyright terms. What used to just be 14 years of a limited monopoly has now been extended to hundreds of years. They're quite literally capturing and monopolizing the value.
When you look at what the average person does, generally speaking, it has little to do with patents and copyrights. The massive amount of creation and creativity we've seen online, with people riffing on art, music, video, code, etc., has largely involved infringing on copyrights held by the rich and powerful, and hoping to god we don't get sued.
Meaning:
(1) Copyright is in no way necessary for encouraging creativity, which was its original mandate. The evidence is in, and people create and innovate a ton without needing to have some sort of monopoly on everything they do.
(2) Far from protecting the little guy from the big guy, copyright has done the exact opposite, given the big guys huge legal recourse to sue little guys into oblivion, block innovation, block competition, and profit forever.
"The means of production" is an antiquated idea. Look at the reality on the ground. Producing and distributing has never been easier, never been more available to the masses, never been more popular. Big companies do not have a monopoly on the means. This whole copyright nonsense is an idea from the days when the printing press was a new invention, and the average person couldn't print. That's no longer true today.
Also, just from a theory perspective, we never made it so that you can copyright and patent recipes, no matter how creative they are. And yet, mom and pop restaurants have always flourished. Copyrights aren't enforced heavily in the software industry. In fact, just the opposite: we have open source. And yet, individual developers can thrive. This idea that without copyright, big companies are just going to steal everything from the little guy and the little guy will have no chance is just not true. The places where you see that happening the most are the places that have the strongest copyright protections, e.g. the music industry, the publishing industry, etc.
In addition, what would the public do with AI companies? They think that AI inference sucks up oceans of water. The same thing would happen here as happened to nuclear reactors after the NRC was made - it would take half a century before the first reactor approved after the NRC was set up to start up.
In practice, we’re OK with theft. We just argue over who gets the loot and which segment of the population gets harmed.
Taxes generally demand payment in the form of general assets, but taking targets specific identified property. Likewise taxes are raised from a general category whereas taking singles out one or a few properties. Now if it was just the targeting of AI companies you could argue it's a one-time AI tax rather than singling out those companies for taking. But once you state that the tax must be paid by shares (and not just assets equal to 50% of market cap) that looks less like a tax and more like appropriation of equity for public good without compensation.
There are other vulnerabilities too - income taxes are explicitly exempted from apportionment. This "tax" would probably run afoul of apportionment.
Half is far too much but that is an amazing idea. Especially if it is used to reduce income taxes.
But given that this is Bernie, it's probably a stalking horse for future expropriations from other industries later.
For example, I created a useful organization at my school before I graduated. That was twenty years ago. It still exists, and people are still benefiting from it. But they don't somehow owe me compensation, nor would I go around saying that they're somehow exploiting me or expropriating my labor just because they're benefiting from what I've done in the past.
Your story doesn't really relate. I get what you are saying, but your org wasn't copyrighted under you, nor did you expect any monetary returns on it. They stole copyrighted work without permission.
Sure, my bad.
> They stole copyrighted work without permission.
While we're nitpicking language, you can't "steal" copyrighted work. Theft/stealing are crimes that apply to situation where property is taken such that its rightful owner no longer has it. Copyright has nothing to do with theft. There is no taking of property involved. Copyright is a violation of a limited monopoly granted to a person/company to be the only one allowed to make copies.
Anyway, for a more substantive point, I think it remains to be seen that training an intelligence on information is the same thing as violating a copyright. For example, nobody would claim it's a copyright violation for a budding author to train his skills by reading tons of books.
But even setting the law aside, just morally, it doesn't seem like it should be any sort of violation. Of course, many people don't like that AI companies are getting rich, but that should be irrelevant. The fact is that nobody is harmed or deprived. Nobody's work is even redistributed. And prevention is easy -- if you don't want people/companies/AIs/etc learning from the material you put out, then keep it secret.
What seems morally bankrupt to me is this idea that anyone should be entitled to control what others are allowed to learn from. If you put information or work out into the public, that should not make you some sort of God who should control whether other people can learn from it or not.
The fact that these companies don't just remove copyrighted work from their product creation chain shows that they feel they are deriving value from the copyrighted works that they wouldn't have if they didn't use copyrighted works.
Maybe that's a nitpick on your phrasing but I am a licensed Picker of Nits (one who happens to be a minarchist, not an anarchist, for what it's worth.)
On the other hand if it put significant money into most people's hands...it's going to be a lot harder to fight.
There are efficiency benefits to the government owning stock vs. using the IRS for collection, that part I like. But I don't trust the US gov to use stock voting rights wisely.
What if it got ownership without voting rights?
Perhaps the assumption is that these large AI companies need large datacenters to operate and that is how they will be regulated. But what about the datacenters outside the US jurisdiction? And what about local AI?
In the old days, the computers were huge and there was one per city. Now, several decades later, we all have plenty of our own computers. I cannot imagine why the trend would not continue with AI. Over time, it is in my opinion plausible that most of our common needs would be satisfied by local AI running on one's home servers or even phones.
How is that going to be regulated by owning a controlling stake in a few US AI companies?
I do not see into the details of what Mr. Bernie Sanders is suggesting. It seems to me though that his idea of somehow regulating the AI needs further development. Because the currently discussed approaches seem to me like a hot take that has not been thought over very well.
Please do not use the term communist lightly, i.e. as an umbrella term for people who express ideas that e.g. more government control or regulation is in some circumstances reasonable.
The only forms of communism that have ever actually materialized in society have all been authoritarian regimes or outright dictatorships. Where the only "truth" is dictated by the governing leader or party. Where you cannot express your opinion freely. Where you cannot e.g. go to a university or have a slightly better job unless you are loyal to the party establishment. Where people are afraid to talk to their neighbors about politics because they cannot know who is going to report them for anti-government opinions. Where people are persecuted, imprisoned or even killed for their opinions.
To the best of my knowledge, Bernie Sanders has never expressed such ideas.
One might argue that here we are talking about the purely academic definition of communism. But unfortunately, in the real world, there is no such thing as academic communism. So far it has always come with the dictatorship and with people who abuse it. Always.
As long as they are voting shares, I don't see an increase in the harm. I'd like to see a legislative framework about how that ownership is handled that allows Congress and regulatory agencies to make decisions restricting how these companies will operate, but without any regard to the constitutional rights of the corporate persons or their owners.
I'm sick of the government arguing with monopolies, then taking dives. I want it to be abundantly clear that government has the ability to restrict these AI utility companies freely (such as their ability to feed on their customers), while still limiting the rights that the state has over the personal use of AI by private individuals. Partial state ownership will make that possible. Hell, let half their boards be publicly elected.
“He who oppresses the poor taunts and insults his Maker, But he who is kind and merciful and gracious to the needy honors Him.” Proverbs 14:31
Most of us are. That's what taxes are, in fact. We have private property rights, and we have to pay taxes. The hard-core anti-tax people try to make that a contradiction; most of the rest of us don't think of it that way, so their "taxation is theft" rhetoric falls flat.
But I think it's important that we keep it at some. Major erosions of private property rights in order "to tax the rich" make me nervous, because I don't want to lose those rights myself. And taking the rights from them, but I get to keep them, seems likely to not be a stable equilibrium.
Seems like a slippery slope argument to forestall any practical positive change which doesn't directly immediately benefit you.
What's actually going to happen though, is every principled parasite at the top will fight tooth and nail to protect every principled right they have while for example the health care, infrastructure, and institutions decline, and they will happily support a fascist demagogue rather than give up those rights (on principles of course! Not on pesky reality).
This is not the first time around. Wealth concentrating policies rely on appealing to the middle class' fear that someone, somewhere will get a benefit that I won't. So principled!
And it works.
C.f. the discussion in Australia right now over whether increasing capital gains tax is 'fair'... The right is talking on principles, conveniently ignoring the massive tax breaks and regulatory capture that have resulted in huge measurable increases in wealth concentration, and justifying those spuriously as overall productivity increases. Principles for thee, pragmatism for me.
Let individuals decide (including in the court of law like in those copyright lawsuits by those few that actually produce valuable content) how theirs is to be used.
I trust Anthropic, heck even Musk, more than I would trust some apparatchik legally empowered to decide for the "people".
Funny how you can use that description for how AI companies used everything for training data.
They were called kings. Cutting their heads off was the best thing to happen to society, ever.
Take the long view. Our particular economic and ideological moment is not worth defending.
China and Russia are simple examples of the fallout of "cutting king's heads".
So awesome in China that they went straight back to a lifetime emperor now.
The French Revolution and its fallout (communism, fascism) killed more humans than any other historic movement, triggering 2 world wars, including numerous genocides.
(Not sure if this is the right approach, but the general idea seems rather important.)
Municipal broadband is just 100% publicly-owned. That's what that means. When you have a national ISP, you might not get a service at all despite the ISP guaranteeing service in exchange for money from the state they've taken. You get a service that starts at $60 but somehow gets to $140 in a few years unless you do the annual cancel dance and if you do cancel you have no other options anyway. And what are you really paying for? Lobbying to make municipal broadband illegal.
And these same people will defend the status quo because of "property rights". Nobody here is Jeff Bezos. Does it seem like things are going well? Is this a legitimate belief in unfettered property rights? Or is it just that you believe you'll be Jeff Bezos one day so you'll benefit from the status quo?
This is the origin of the quote possibly misattributed to Steinbeck that Americans view themselves as "temporarily embarrassed millionaires".
I'm reminded of a quote from Martin Niemöller.... Perhaps our Constitution would protect us against such things. But why risk it?
My problem with this kind of argument is that it weights future hypothetical harm as more important than documented historical harm. Did we forget how Verizon FIOS throttled Netflix [1]? Also, what examples do we have of any municipal broadband in the US doing any kind of repression?
The truth here is that big companies are more complicit to government intervention than small ones are.
It's an odd quote to bring up because Niemoller was a concentration camp guard turned survivor who was arguing against inaction against the Nazis because it doesn't affect you, against being a bystander basically.
Are we really likening municipal broadband to the Holocaust? Really?
[1]: https://blog.flashrouters.com/2021/07/12/tired-netflix-throt...
The fact is, we have tried exactly what you’re suggesting. We don’t even need to get to the brutal communism of China or the Soviet Union. The “social democracy” of India and Bangladesh (where I’m from) left those countries’ economies in the toilet.
The best case scenario for social democracy was the DDR. My wife lived for a year in former eastern germany—in 2001, when the socialist government was as far back in time as Obama’s first term is to today—and folks recall being reasonably happy under socialism. But western germany was still much more prosperous, and it took huge solidarity payments to help the former east germany catch up.
But to talk about broadband more specifically, one of the main reasons why municipal broadband started becoming a thing was because in many areas, where there is but one (private) broadband provider to choose from, that provider would proceed to refuse to upgrade the infrastructure even when municipalities offered buttloads of cash to pay for the upgrades. So the municipal broadband choice becomes "get municipal broadband at 1 gig, or private company broadband at 25 meg (asymmetric)."
The buildout issue is real, and is a reason to explore public-owned broadband in underinvested areas. But even if we had only AT&T here, none of the arguments really work. Even the monopolism concern isn't operative (AT&T and Xfinity don't jack their rates up in places they happen to be the monopoly supplier --- they quote nationally visible rates).
At scale, why would utilities be different than other government services, such as schools or transit?
I’m sure there are edge cases in parts of the country that are too poor or sparely populated to support a robust private sector. But I don’t live in a place like that, and most people don’t. I live in the suburbs of Annapolis. And I’ve lived in Chicago, Baltimore, New York City, DC, and Wilmington Delaware. Would I rather have Comcast run my internet, or the governments of any of those cities? More to the point: would I want to live in the counterfactual scenario where the 1996 telecom act had gone in a different direction, and those cities had built broadband networks that were now 30 years old in whatever shape they were after decades of maintained by those cities?
My experience with the municipal services these cities do run says “no.” And that conclusion is counter to my ideology. I like public infrastructure. I structured my life around commuting over the DC Metro and Amtrak for years. But, for example, the DC Metro deferred maintenance to such a degree that the automated train control built in the 1970s had to be shut off in 2009. Headways got longer, the ride got much rougher. It stayed that way for fifteen years until they turned ATO back on last year. So in 2026, the big achievement is that we’re back to the ride smoothness we had in 1980.
Pay up. Municipal broadband is objectively better than the other options pretty much everywhere it hasn't been banned.
Municipal broadbands were laying 1 gig fiber service while Spectrum and Comcast were still selling 10mb/s as standard.
Surveys of Chinese citizens show very high levels of satisfaction with their government [2] while Chinese people view the West through the "kill line" [3]. The funny part about that is the NYT blaming the kill line on "state media" [4] when it originated on Chinese social media. But that's how deep the anti-China propaganda goes in the US. The transformation Chinese people have seen in their daily lives in their lifetimes is something undeniable [5], liting ~800M people out of extreme poverty. What has the West done in that time? Does it seem like things are going well?
So all I did was point out how people like municipal broadband and you went straight to the slippery slope fallacy "but that's communism!" without actually knowing what communism actually is it seems.
The idea is pretty simple. The people should have a stake in the value they create. You know who else believes that? The US Department of Defense [6]. Is the Defense Department "Communist" too?
[1]: https://freedomhouse.org/country/china
[2]: https://ash.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/final_pol...
[3]: https://fpif.org/how-the-kill-line-redefined-the-american-dr...
[4]: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/13/business/china-american-p...
[5]: https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/server/api/core/bitstrea...
[6]: https://investorplace.com/dailylive/2026/06/the-pentagon-is-...
Well, producing the demand for those manufacturing jobs, for one thing.
Err, wait a minute...
Ironically, China proves that “democratic socialism” is exactly the wrong thing for a developing country. Democracy is optional for a developing country, but capitalism is indispensable.
There are those who believe that a human mind is somehow magic and a special exception to the laws of physics, but I am not one of those people.