Bernie Sanders call to seize the AI industry has damning lessons about politics today

Sen.Bernie Sanders’ latest communist fever dream — nationalize half the AI industry — is telling in a host of ways: Damning about his entire political project and the modern US political world.It has zero chance of passing even a Democratic Congress; it’s blatantly unconstitutional; it’s economic suicide — and it’s fundamentally tyrannical.

But his call to seize trillions of dollars of private property doesn’t get him laughed out of the discussion.Indeed, it will likely soon be a regular talking point for the movement he leads.Which means there’s an excellent chance some scaled-down version of it will be grist for multiple 2028 presidential campaigns, and the demand of lefties in Congress — and so prompt serious consideration of various “compromise” proposals.

He did the same thing with “Medicare for All,” his push for socialized medicine; others in the party did it with demands for open borders — which became the Biden administration’s de facto policy.Heck, his also-lunatic call for a national moratorium on new data centers is inspiring pushes for state-level ones that could well become law, for example in New York, when every single claim about the centers’ evils is utter poppycock.Even his argument for the AI-seizure idea is absurd: He insists that “the foundation of AI is based on the collective knowledge of humanity and the creative work of tens of millions of people.” Subscribe to our daily Post Opinion newsletter! Please provide a valid email.

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OK: Several companies have played fast-and-loose with intellectual-property rights in training up their Large Language Models software, but our laws already offer a template for justice there: Just use existing royalty systems that, for example, compensate songwriters when a measure of music they wrote is sampled and streamed on Spotify....