Bernie’s Total and Complete Shutdown of Everything

By Noah Rothman

Friday, September 04, 2026

 

No sooner did OpenAI announce that its agent, GPT-6 Astra, had won the industry-wide race to develop something approximating artificial general intelligence than Senator Bernie Sanders announced a plan to ban it.

 

“We need an immediate PAUSE on advanced AI development, and a permanent BAN on superintelligence,” the socialist senator from Vermont wrote, “an artificial mind smarter than any human, capable of operating independently beyond our control.” It would be “irresponsible for society to allow them to move forward and make these products even more advanced,” he cautioned. The “future of humanity” is in the balance.

 

Of course, Sanders was only using the news of OpenAI’s achievement as a hook to popularize his preexisting hostility toward AI. He and the far-left Representative Greg Casar co-sponsored the “Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act,” which would “permanently ban” proficient artificial intelligence while also expanding the government — indeed, creating a new cabinet-level federal agency — to suppress the development of AI products.

 

This latest push is a more direct assault on AI than his roundabout effort to cripple the industry by depriving it of the infrastructure on which it relies. “This process is moving very, very quickly, and we need to slow it down,” Sanders said late last year. That’s why he supported a national moratorium on the construction of data centers — to “give democracy a chance to catch up.”

 

When he and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez sponsored a bill that would do just that, the two progressives argued that data centers and their construction “inflate electric bills in communities across the country.” Perhaps their haste was an attempt to outrun the data. Today, the preponderance of evidence indicates that, on net, data centers reduce consumer power bills.

 

That’s what one study of electricity prices between 2015 and 2024 found. “For every 10 percent increase in data center capacity, average household electricity prices fell by about 0.4 percent,” read one analysis of the study. “Between 2019 and 2024, the average household customer lived in a state where data center capacity grew by 160 percent. That lowered their electricity price by 6 percent.”

 

That’s not terribly surprising given the degree to which modern data centers are required to pay the costs that they generate, and local jurisdictions use “cost‑causation principles to prevent residential customers from subsidizing industrial load,” as one industry insider explained.

 

If America had listened to Sanders and AOC, Americans would have handcuffed themselves amid a global competition to be the first to realize the civilizational promise that AI holds for the future. Maybe that’s the whole point.

 

If that sounds uncharitable, survey Sanders’s record. He is congenitally hostile to the latest innovation, and a consistent proponent of the most naïve and outlandish claims against it.

 

“Any proposal to avert the climate crisis must include a full fracking ban on public and private lands,” Sanders argued in 2019. “Fracking is a danger to our water supply. It’s a danger to the air we breathe. It causes earthquakes. It’s highly explosive. Safe fracking is, like clean coal, pure fiction.”

 

This logic culminated in a 2020 bill Sanders sponsored alongside AOC and Senator Jeff Merkley: the “Ban Fracking Act.” Had it become law, the bill would have cost millions of jobs, increased consumer energy costs, and deprived the U.S. of the geostrategic benefits it now derives from its role as the world’s foremost exporter of liquefied natural gas.

 

Sanders’s arguments in favor of the bill were, of course, nonsense. Fracking doesn’t make your faucets explode or contaminate the water table, which is situated well above the deposits that horizontal drilling targets. It can produce tremors, not earthquakes, which are, at best, a nuisance. It’s not clear how fracking pollutes the air, unless he’s arguing against the combustion of fossil fuels.

 

Of course, he was. The Sanders-Merkley “Keep It in the Ground Act” would have performed exactly as advertised. As a law, it would have blocked “all future leases” for oil, gas, shale, and tar sands exploration on federal lands, offshore deposits, and in the Arctic and Atlantic Oceans. The bill was designed to codify his opportunistic call for “no new offshore drilling” — “not now, not ever” — amid the panic on the left inspired by the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill. After all, unless it’s a renewable energy technology, “it’s not good enough to be 99 percent safe.”

 

The following year, Sanders attempted to similarly exploit the disastrous earthquake and tsunami that contributed to Japan’s Fukushima nuclear disaster. The only proper response to that event, the senator insisted, was a “moratorium on all licensing and re-licensing” for new and existing nuclear reactors, repealing the law that shields the nuclear industry from frivolous lawsuits, and the withdrawal of funds earmarked for “more nuclear power plants.”

 

Fortunately, the country had the good sense to ignore Bernie. If the country had succumbed to his emotionally manipulative arguments, which almost always either exploit uncertainty around a new technology or anxiety over the prospect of exceedingly rare engineering failures, the country would have less technology and less power.

 

And they have the temerity to call this “progress.”

The Real Bernie Sanders Always Stands Up for What’s Wrong

By John Fund

Friday, July 24, 2026

 

There are very few politicians who are poorer judges of character than Bernie Sanders. The Vermont senator ignored warnings and defended fellow socialist and sex pest Graham Platner through multiple scandals for almost a year. Platner withdrew from the Senate race only after a serious sexual assault allegation.

 

This week, video surfaced that Bernie’s blindness has a long history. His old communist ally, 80-year-old Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega, announced there would no longer be any elections in his country — no doubt to ensure he would be succeeded in office by his 75-year-old vice president and wife and eventually his son.

 

Ortega has ruthlessly run Nicaragua for 19 years, having returned to power in 2007 after his Sandinista regime was ejected by voters in 1990. He has since jailed almost all of his political opponents. Over 300 people were killed by his security forces during protests in 2018, and the left-wing Human Rights Watch concluded, “High-level Nicaraguan officials bear responsibility for grave, pervasive abuses.”

 

At the time, Sanders did express concern over the “anti-democratic” drift of Nicaragua. But he has been almost completely silent since then. That’s because back in 1985, he traveled to Nicaragua at Ortega’s invitation to celebrate his regime. While there, he called Ortega “an impressive guy” and said that, while Fidel Castro wasn’t “perfect,” Americans shouldn’t forget that “just because Ronald Reagan dislikes these people, doesn’t mean that people in their own nations feel the same way.”

 

Amazingly, Sanders acknowledged that his views could lead to him being “attacked by every editorial writer in the free press for being a ‘dumb dupe.’” He then proceeded to prove that this was exactly what he was doing: he said that Cubans appreciated Castro’s rule because he “educated their kids, gave their kids health care, totally transformed the society.”

 

Now, 40 years later, Bernie has become the Pied Piper for the Democratic Socialists of America, whose adherents range from Zohran Mamdani to AOC and are pledging a “total transformation” of American society.

 

One thing is clear: Bernie is always certain of his moral superiority and always wrong as to what it leads to.

The Plan to Confiscate AI Company Stock

By Daniel J. Pilla

Wednesday, July 15, 2026

 

For years, socialist advocates of Big Government have pushed wealth taxes as the next step in redistributing the fruits of one’s labor and enterprise. Their premise is that government has a superior claim to the wealth accumulated by successful individuals and businesses, even after the payment of taxes incurred in the creation and consumption of that wealth. Whether the target is high-income earners, inherited wealth, or unrealized capital gains, those advocates’ objective has been to transfer private assets (beyond mere “income”) into the hands of the state.

 

Leftist U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders’ proposed American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act (introduced in the Senate on June 19 but yet unnumbered) crosses a line that previous redistributionist lawmakers didn’t reach. Sanders’ scheme goes beyond simply taxing wealth. It compels business owners to surrender ownership of the company itself that creates their wealth.

 

The distinction matters.

 

I’ve written before about proposals such as Minnesota’s wealth tax proposal, which would punish the accumulation of capital by taxing assets that were built through years of investment, creativity, innovation, and risk-taking. Those proposals are economically destructive, but at least they leave ownership of the income-producing assets in private hands.

 

Sanders’ proposal is fundamentally different. Instead of merely taxing successful businesses, it would require qualifying artificial intelligence (AI) companies to transfer half of their ownership interests directly to the federal government, to be controlled in a so-called “sovereign wealth fund.” The federal government would become a major owner of private companies, but not because it invested capital, developed technology, assumed entrepreneurial risk, or purchased stock in the marketplace. They would become owners because Congress ordered the transfer.

 

While the mechanism is labeled as an “excise tax,” the tax must be paid by transferring company equity in such an amount that “immediately after the tax has been paid, the [federal government] shall hold 50 percent of all outstanding equity interests” in the company. That’s not taxation. That’s outright theft by government of private assets carried out under the socialist concept of compulsory state ownership.

 

Sanders’ motivation is driven by the same philosophy that drives all modern socialists: free markets are unfair in that they end up vesting substantial wealth in the hands of just a few. Sanders’ remarks in the proposed act justifying the theft of private assets include: “The 8 richest Americans — all AI oligarchs — together have more than $2.9 trillion in wealth, more than bottom 59 percent of U.S. households combined.” Beyond that, the “findings” of fact presented in the introduction to the bill itself declare that artificial intelligence “is a public resource” chiefly because “a small number of oligarchs have essentially stolen the creative work of hundreds of millions of people” in order to create it.

 

To Sanders’ way of thinking, the alleged theft of intellectual property by AI developers justifies government theft of half the stock of AI companies. The bill asserts that the wealth generated by AI “must benefit humanity.”

 

Sanders portrays his proposal as allowing every American to “share in the wealth” of the AI revolution. He ignores the fact that every American already has the right to “share in” such wealth. All one has to do is buy stock in any AI company that is publicly traded. But the truth is this proposal is not about providing opportunity to the common citizen. It’s about the Marxist idea of transferring ownership of private property into the hands of the state, by force when necessary.

 

Under the legislation, a government-controlled “sovereign wealth fund” would receive the value of the transferred ownership interests, and all Americans would purportedly receive annual dividend payments, estimated at roughly $1,000 per person. Sanders claims that eventually, “the wealth that it generates could be used to ensure that every man, woman and child in the United States has a decent and dignified standard of living, including the right to health care, education, housing, and a healthy and habitable environment.”

 

But the proposal is that just 5 percent of the wealth of the fund would be used for direct payments to Americans. What would the balance of the 95 percent be used for? The answer is government-sponsored welfare programs, including “access to health care, education, and housing.” In other words, programs that create even more dependence on government.

 

Who doesn’t want free money from the government? But that promise ignores the most fundamental principle of free markets: Those who receive the rewards should also bear the risks. Investors purchase stock with their own money. Entrepreneurs mortgage their homes, invest their savings, sometimes go without paychecks, and spend years building businesses that often fail. They devote their careers to creating products that consumers voluntarily purchase. Every dollar earned represents risk assumed by someone. The recipients of these proposed government dividends have assumed none of that risk. They invested nothing. They sacrificed nothing. They stand to lose nothing if the enterprise performs poorly. Sanders affirms this very fact, claiming that “If the value of these companies goes down, as others have suggested, the companies would bear the losses, not the federal government.”

 

And there’s the rub. The federal government stands in the unique position of an uninvested “partner.” It would acquire ownership without purchasing it. Unlike every legitimate shareholder in the marketplace, Washington would obtain its interest by legislative fiat entirely without risk.

 

There is a world of difference between earning ownership and confiscating it.

 

Moreover, once the federal government has control of the income generated by its 50 percent ownership interest, there’s simply no restriction on what it can do with it. As we know from the long experiment with the Social Security benefits program, future Congresses can change the law any way they wish with just 51 percent of the support of sitting legislators and a willing president. As years pass, future citizens might get a dividend payment, but they might not.

 

Perhaps the most troubling aspect of the proposal is its governance structure. The legislation contemplates an “Independent Commission for Democratic AI” to manage the public’s interest. The commission would consist of seven unelected members (nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate) selected from a list of candidates provided by Congress. The commission would exercise voting authority over government-owned shares and participate directly in corporate governance.

 

The irony is rich. Sanders is concerned that currently, just eight individuals in the private sector control substantial amounts of American wealth. Instead, he would substitute that for seven unelected bureaucrats and political hacks exercising forced control over the operations of private businesses. That concept should alarm anyone who values free enterprise.

 

Businesses exist to develop products, satisfy customers’ needs, innovate, and earn returns for those who invest their resources. Government exists to establish reasonable rules to prevent one person or business from unlawfully converting the income or assets of another through force or by fraud. Those are entirely different functions. Once political appointees begin participating in the management of private enterprises, business decisions inevitably become political decisions. And you can be sure that depending upon who happens to control Congress and the While House, about one half of the population will vehemently disagree with those decisions.

 

History demonstrates that governments are remarkably poor at efficiently allocating capital. Bureaucrats respond to political pressure, election cycles, interest groups, and ideological agendas. Entrepreneurs respond to the wants and needs of consumers. Their free purchasing decisions (or not) in the marketplace control the success or failure of a particular business. Government should never be involved in such decisions.

 

The commission would not be bound by factors that ensure the best interests of the company’s investors or customers. Rather, the commission would be “mandated to promote the goals of worker welfare, public safety, fair competition, environmental sustainability, and financial solvency.” These politically motivated concepts are entirely undefined. Moreover, the money in the fund could never be used to provide “financial assistance to, or for the benefit of” any AI company from whom the wealth is confiscated. Thus, the proposal is, in every sense of the word, a one-way street.

 

Even more concerning is the unique nature of the companies targeted by this legislation. AI is rapidly becoming one of the principal means through which Americans obtain information, conduct research, communicate, and create and operate businesses. Government ownership of substantial voting interests in these companies raises obvious concerns.

 

To be clear, the legislation does not expressly authorize government officials to determine what information Americans may access via the AI platforms it would partly own. But it is not unreasonable to ask where that path may lead. If political appointees possess and exercise meaningful influence over the governance of companies that increasingly shape information, communications, and technological development, today’s corporate governance authority could become tomorrow’s influence over product design, content policies, or access to emerging technologies. It is not a wild leap to suggest that government’s direct control of boardrooms could turn into direct control over the nature of the information Americans are allowed to use and consume. Remember the Disinformation Governance Board, created in 2022 within the Department of Homeland Security during the Biden administration? Here we go again!

 

This is precisely the potential worst-case scenario that Americans should examine before granting government unprecedented ownership authority over the nation’s most innovative private enterprises.

 

This proposal also creates a dangerous precedent that could extend far beyond artificial intelligence. If Congress can require AI companies to surrender half their ownership because the industry has become so “systemically important,” what prevents the next Congress and president from applying the same reasoning to pharmaceutical companies, energy producers, home builders, financial institutions, insurance providers, food producers, biotech firms, or car manufacturers? Aren’t all of these sectors systemically important? Once compulsory government ownership of private enterprise is accepted as legitimate, the list of future targets becomes a matter of political preference rather than constitutional principle.

 

This is an open, brazen Marxist attack on private property itself. Private ownership is not merely an economic arrangement. It is one of the principal safeguards of individual liberty. When citizens own property independent of government, they possess a measure of independence from government itself. As government ownership of the means of production expands, private independence necessarily contracts. The end result is total dependence on government for one’s daily needs. There is no leverage in changing another’s opinion or compelling his support greater than that of being the provider of the daily sustenance that person needs to live.

 

That is why proposals like Minnesota’s wealth tax are so troubling. They gradually erode the connection between effort and reward. Sanders’ proposal goes even further by weakening the connection between ownership and investment. America did not become the world’s leader in innovation because unelected bureaucrats directed the activities of private enterprise. It became the world’s leader because entrepreneurs risked their own fortunes, investors voluntarily supplied capital, and consumers — not bureaucrats — determined which ideas succeeded.

 

The American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act turns that formula upside down.

 

It allows politicians to acquire substantial ownership of successful companies without risking taxpayer capital in the marketplace. It allows millions of Americans to receive investment returns from businesses in which they invested nothing, and for whose failures they bear no financial responsibility. It places government appointees in positions of influence over some of the most strategically important technology companies in the world with no accountability to the marketplace.

The Oligarchy Myth

By Michael Dresdale

Saturday, June 13, 2026

 

In California’s gubernatorial primary, Tom Steyer — the billionaire investor and patron of progressive causes — was widely seen as the standard-bearer of the Democratic Party’s socialist faction. He won the endorsements of the Bernie Sanders-founded Our Revolution and progressive stalwarts like Representative Ro Khanna (D., Calif.), despite the vast personal fortune he amassed as a hedge fund manager — a job that sits just below Big Oil executive in the progressive hierarchy of moral opprobrium.

 

But despite having poured over $200 million of his own money into electing himself, he will ultimately be on the outside looking in come November. Steyer outspent former Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra on advertising by a nearly twenty-to-one margin, but Becerra has advanced to the general election; Steyer, in contrast, failed to secure enough primary votes to get the second spot on California’s November ballot, losing out to Republican Steve Hilton.

 

Steyer’s underwhelming performance has exposed the limits of the very charge he and Sanders have spent the past year prosecuting: that what fundamentally ails America is oligarchic control of politics.

 

In barnstorming the country on his “Fighting Oligarchy” tour, Sanders has pressed his case in characteristically blunt terms: “You have to be blind not to see that what we have today is a government of the billionaires, by the billionaires, and for the billionaires.” Yet when billionaires themselves have tried to convert dollars into votes, the results have been disappointing-bordering-on-dismal. Beyond his gubernatorial bid, Steyer spent nearly $350 million boosting his run for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination — an effort that failed to win him even a single delegate. Michael Bloomberg, whose fortune makes Steyer’s look like a modest nest egg, spent over $1 billion on his own 2020 campaign; for all that expense and trouble, the only primary contest he won was American Samoa’s — presumably home to many grateful users of the Bloomberg terminal. As New York’s June primaries approach, Representative Dan Goldman (D., N.Y.) — scion to the Levi Strauss fortune — looks to be on the cusp of political annihilation at the hands of former New York City Comptroller Brad Lander, despite outraising Lander three-to-one and pledging to match every donated dollar.

 

To be fair, the claim that American politics is fundamentally oligarchic does not rest on billionaires holding office themselves. Politicians must still raise money to campaign, and that necessity creates an opening for the moneyed classes. Billionaires need not enter the scrum, this view holds, when so many elected supplicants will do their bidding.

 

The contention that politicians serve their donors rather than their voters is as old as electoral politics. Political scientists have long tested its explanatory power in contemporary American politics. In 2014, two of them, Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page, lent the view support in a paper finding that the preferences of the rich overwhelmingly shape public policy. A subsequent stream of research, however, challenged the assumption that those laws were passed because they pleased the donor class. To cite just one paper complicating the Gilens and Page view, Alexander Branham and his co-authors found that a huge swath of the rich’s apparent wins could as easily be credited to the fact that their desired policies also enjoyed middle-class support. When their preferences diverged from the middle class’s, the rich won only 53 percent of the time — and even then, the policies leaned in no consistent ideological direction.

 

Step back from the regressions, and the pattern of which causes have won and lost this century suggests that the Business Roundtable and its allies have not held the whip hand in our politics. In 2013, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce — the institutional home of Sanders’s reviled plutocrats — spent $50 million backing Congress’s push for comprehensive immigration reform. That effort died in the Republican-controlled House at the hands of grassroots opposition. Thirteen years later, neither President Trump’s immigration crackdown nor his dizzying array of tariffs ranks high on corporate America’s wish-list.

 

Perhaps nowhere do America’s billionaires appear more politically impotent than in their own backyards. New York and California are home to 38 percent of the nation’s billionaires, many clustered in New York City and San Francisco. But the two states levy two of the highest top marginal tax rates in the country, with New York City throwing in an upper-bracket income tax of its own for good measure. Moreover, the recent political trajectories of both states — and their most dynamic cities — bear little imprint of billionaire control. In New York City, the mayoralty was won by the self-avowed socialist Zohran Mamdani, who ran on ratcheting up taxes on the wealthy. The state declined to enact the full suite of Mamdani proposals, but one tax it did adopt falls on the expensive apartments that the rich keep as second homes. Mamdani has pressed his agenda by picking fights with individual billionaires. In California, meanwhile, several billionaires have fled the state to escape a proposed wealth tax headed for the November ballot, one that would carve a one-time, five-percent chunk out of their fortunes.

 

The more one wrestles with the many instances of billionaire interests losing in the political arena, the clearer it becomes that “oligarchy” has become a political crutch for the left — a way of explaining away defeat as the work of class opponents cunningly deploying their financial power, rather than as the expression of sincere disagreement on the part of the mass of American voters. Many people may have discrete complaints about America’s imperfect capitalist reality, but few of them, false consciousness or not, are eager to see it thrown overboard wholesale.

 

The danger of the left’s embrace of the oligarchy thesis is that it risks blinding the public to a genuinely valuable aspect of American capitalism. “Oligarchy” does fairly describe many economies, past and present. The Economist’s crony-capitalism index captures the difference: It measures the share of a country’s billionaire wealth drawn from state-dependent, rent-heavy sectors — telecoms, mining, casinos, defense — against the share generated in competitive ones. Unsurprisingly, the 2023 rankings put Putin’s Russia at the top, with crony wealth equal to 19 percent of GDP. In the United States, the figure was 2 percent.

 

The left blurs this distinction, treating inequality as equally condemnable whether it springs from cronyism or from competition. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s (D., N.Y.) insistence that there is no ethical way to amass a billion dollars underscores the point. Earning a billion dollars — or many times that — by building a company that hundreds of millions of people freely use is a supremely pro-social act. Of course, we can debate in good faith how much a productive billionaire ought to pay in taxes. But our scorn should be reserved for those whose path to wealth runs through a Machiavellian climb into the inner rings of power, only to use that proximity to exploit their fellow citizens rather than serve them.

 

One of the strongest criticisms of the Trump administration is that it, too, is blurring the lines between these two modes of capitalism through the intense personalization of the executive branch. As the Wall Street Journal has documented, Trump has taken a personal hand in the Food and Drug Administration’s drug approvals, the Federal Trade Commission’s merger reviews, and the Federal Communications Commission’s authority over broadcast licenses. The administration can offer a plausible rationale for any one of these interventions. Cumulatively, though, they leave a different impression — that the administrative state’s technocracy has been restored to a clientelist species of democratic control. Unsurprisingly, spending on lobbying targeting the White House has surged to record levels.

 

Robert Dahl, the political scientist and great student of American government’s messiness, described America’s pluralist political reality as one of “multiple centers of power, none of which is or can be wholly sovereign.” The threat to that reality does not come from a creeping control by business over government, but from government’s desire to insinuate into every corner of business — a tendency visible in different forms in both political parties. Should the trend hold, and a growing share of our companies come to feel that their fates rest on the centralized decisions of regulators and politicians rather than the dispersed judgments of investors and consumers, then today’s overheated accusations will be borne out as tomorrow’s sober predictions.

Bernie Sanders’s ‘Wealth Fund’ Scheme Has Already Been Tried

By John Gustavsson

Monday, June 08, 2026

 

Bernie Sanders announced last week that he will be introducing legislation aimed at creating an artificial intelligence sovereign wealth fund. Sanders proposes confiscating 50 percent of AI equity and putting it into a public fund, having the government act as an active shareholder. Sanders falsely implies that this is a mainstream practice around the world. It is quite telling that Sanders does not understand how Norway’s sovereign wealth fund, built from oil revenue and currently buying small stakes in a number of AI firms at the market price, differs from his own proposed state confiscation. In fact, only Sweden provides a real historical precedent — and that experiment ended in a disaster that forever changed the country’s political environment.

 

In 1976, the Swedish Trade Union Confederation proposed the creation of löntagarfonder, or employee funds. The issue had been debated since 1971, when the Confederation funded a study to lay out how such funds might work. This study was released to a warm reception in 1975 and officially was endorsed by the government the following year. Under the original plan, any corporation with more than about 50 employees would be required each year to issue new shares equivalent to 20 percent of its profits. Control of these shares would go to the individual unions that made up the Confederation. Gradually, these unions would gain a majority stake, effectively socializing the economy.

 

This was a radical deviation from traditional Swedish social democracy. The Social Democrats party, while proudly left-wing, had prided itself on its rejection of Bolshevism, even going so far as to round up communists into concentration camps during World War II. The party’s long streak in government was the result not just of good outcomes, but of pragmatism: The monarchy was left in place, and while tax levels rose, these taxes — beyond a mostly symbolic wealth tax — did not chiefly target the aristocracy.

 

In the late 1960s, this began change, as radical left-wing trends sweeping the world reached Sweden. Taxes began to rise sharply. The 1938 agreement between unions and the employers’ confederation that guaranteed no government interference in the labor market — the reason Sweden to this day does not have a legal minimum wage — was violated by the government for the first time in 1974, in the unions’ favor.

 

Soon after, the Confederation, flush with confidence, proposed the employee funds. The Social Democrats, a party that had once founded the Confederation and was bankrolled largely by union contributions, found themselves unable to disown the idea.

 

The timing could not have been worse. After enjoying a post-war boom even stronger than the United States’, the Swedish economy had already stalled under the weight of high oil prices and increased international competition. The mere prospect of the employee funds greatly contributed to families behind iconic Swedish firms like IKEA and Tetra Pak leaving the country.

 

In 1976, after an election campaign dominated by the employee-funds issue and Sweden’s infamous above-100 percent marginal tax rates, the Social Democrats were defeated, ending a 44-year streak in power. Despite this, the party, still in the unions’ headlock, officially endorsed and ran on establishing employee funds ahead of the next election in 1979. They were again defeated.

 

Finally, after returning to power in 1982, the employee funds became a reality, albeit in a watered-down form. The minister of finance at the time, Kjell-Olof Feldt, was caught on camera furiously writing a poem in the plenary on the very day the funds legislation was passed. In the poem, he cursed the funds that he — despite publicly endorsing them — knew would hurt Sweden’s economy and cursed the union bosses who forced him, an old-school social democrat, to implement them. Outside the Riksdag, over 75,000 people gathered to protest the funds, in what was (and continues to be) the largest right-wing demonstration in Sweden’s history.

 

Almost one-sixth of Sweden’s business dynasties had left the country by 1988. This number conceals a far greater capital flight: 67 percent of the wealth held by the 50 wealthiest Swedes was by the early 1990s held by those living abroad.

 

After the victory of the right in the 1991 election, abolishing the funds became the very first act of the new coalition government. To discourage the unions from ever trying again, the center-right government refused to let the unions keep the money already in the funds, instead using it to fund a number of research foundations and two venture capital firms.

 

The government spent its one term in office cleaning up the fallout from both from the capital flight and a collapsed real-estate bubble, which had been caused by a credit boom stemming from the Social Democrats’ decision to abolish liquidity ratios. That boom had also drastically increased money supply, but as the Social Democrats had refused adjust the krona’s fixed exchange rate, this left the currency overvalued and vulnerable to speculators.

 

This problem, too, was left to the center-right government, which reluctantly agreed to abolish the fixed exchange rate regime altogether after a massive speculative attack by none other than George Soros, with the aid of current U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.

 

Subsequent changes to the Social Democrats’ statutes drastically reduced the unions’ influence, as the party chose to rededicate itself to pragmatism and its two core ideological principles: to take power, and to keep it. Feeling secure enough that the era of socialization was over, some — but not all — of the entrepreneurs who had left Sweden went on to return beginning in the 1990s. Today, not even the Swedish Left Party, which during the Cold War was bankrolled by the Soviet Union, seeks the reestablishment of the employee funds.

 

Yet the mark it left on Swedish politics remains. After trusting and accommodating the Social Democrats for over 40 years, Swedish businesses began to organize politically, funding not just political campaigns but also still-active think tanks to fight back against the left-wing consensus and educate the next generation of right-wing leaders (including current Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson).

 

Rest assured that even in Europe, Sanders’s unique blend of Luddite Bolshevism is a no-sell, and the mere prospect of such an idea being implemented would surely cause capital flight from the U.S., just as happened in Sweden. Those short-lived employee funds live on today only as a cautionary tale against socialization. If America goes down Sanders’s path, it will no doubt find itself writing the next chapter of that tale.

From Smash to Grab

By Andrew Stuttaford

Tuesday, June 02, 2026

 

I’m old enough to remember when Bernie Sanders proposed a moratorium on the construction of data centers.

 

The Hill, March 25, 2026:

 

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) plan to introduce legislation that would bar construction of all new data centers until “strong national safeguards are in place.”

 

The pair announced the Artificial Intelligence Data Center Moratorium Act on Wednesday, which aims to halt construction of AI infrastructure until lawmakers enact measures requiring government reviews of AI products, preventing mass job displacement and limiting increases in consumer electricity prices.

 

Now, however, there is this. Sanders, writing in the New York Times:

 

I will soon be introducing the American A.I. Sovereign Wealth Fund Act. This legislation would give the public a direct ownership stake in the largest A.I. companies in our country. How? 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.

 

Yes, expropriation.

 

At a quick glance, these two proposals seem to contradict each other. The moratorium, self-evidently enough, is designed to slow down the roll-out of hyperscale data centers and, by extension, AI.

 

There may be cases where a data center is inappropriate for a certain site. But that is something to be sorted out on a local basis, not by a blanket, top-down moratorium, especially when that moratorium is “about” far more than ensuring, say, that new data centers place an undue burden on electricity bills or are too noisy or too bright for their planned location or (and this is not generally an issue that stands up to scrutiny) threaten water supplies.

 

Thus, the areas in which Sanders would like to see “guardrails” established before the lifting of his moratorium include measures to ensure “the economic gains of AI and robotics will benefit workers, not just the wealthy owners of Big Tech.” That looks like an invitation to a debate that could last years, which may well be the point.

 

In a press release explaining his proposed moratorium, Sanders also argued:

 

This bill will stop a global race to see which country is the first to eliminate hundreds of millions of jobs, or the first to build an AI that destroys the planet. It accomplishes this by banning U.S. exports of AI computing infrastructure to countries that do not have safeguards in place to guarantee AI is safe and effective, workers are protected and AI does not harm the environment.

 

The restrictions on exports are, if imposed intelligently, fine, but Sanders’s moratorium will not stop a “global race” to develop ever more advanced AI. It will merely concede it to China. We don’t know yet what the effects of AI on jobs will be, but, unless we move forward with it, we will not discover what jobs it can create here. But we will find out what how many jobs the U.S. will lose to AI-powered foreign competition.

 

As for ensuring that the U.S. does not develop an AI that “destroys the planet,” let’s just say that unilateral disarmament is highly unlikely to avoid the development (or attempt to develop) such lethal AI elsewhere. Best guess: it will merely ensure that if such AI is ever developed it will be by the Beijing regime, and that the U.S. will have no response.

 

Sanders’s proposed expropriation is not aimed at enriching the taxpayer (an aim somewhat difficult to reconcile with his moratorium), but it does look a lot like an alternative route to gumming up the development of AI in the U.S.

 

He writes:

 

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.

 

It would take up an immense amount of space to list the ways in which big government could abuse that power. That its involvement would also slow down the development of AI would be inevitable.

 

The mere existence of such a proposal (and indeed the moratorium) is likely to scare off capital and talent from a technology that may hand the U.S. immense technological and geopolitical advantages. Why do that?

 

Moreover, some of that talent and capital could easily end up elsewhere. Doors would open in Beijing.

 

Imagine if Thomas Edison or Henry Ford had been obliged to contend with a Sanders. Or picture the moment when, sensing an approaching storm, Benjamin Franklin makes his big move only to be confronted by a time-traveling Sanders and told to step away from the kite.

California’s Wealth Tax: Let’s Go Serfin’

By Andrew Stuttaford

Tuesday, April 28, 2026

 

In the most recent Capital Letter, I wrote about Elizabeth Warren’s proposed Ultra-Millionaire Tax Act, a wealth tax aimed with various degrees of viciousness at those worth more than $50 million, which I saw as a neofeudalist move:

 

Under the “classic” feudalism introduced in England by the Normans after their hostile takeover in 1066, ownership of land and anything built upon it ultimately belonged to the crown. Movable property was a different matter. What was yours was essentially yours, if subject to levies at awkward moments. That probably means that Senator Elizabeth Warren thinks of William the Conqueror as having been a soft touch. Should her Ultra-Millionaire Tax Act pass (and be found to be constitutional), everything, however contingently, will become property of the state. . . .

 

I noted that “the progressive clamor for wealth taxes is growing louder and is reflected at both the state and federal levels as well as internationally.”

 

And so, right on schedule, California progressives have reportedly gotten the signatures they need for a vote on a “one-off” wealth tax on the assets of Californians worth more than $1 billion, a process that would include ascribing a valuation on voting interests in a company that exceeds a billionaire’s equity stake, a provision so stupidly destructive that it can only be understood by seeing wealth taxes for what they are: a weapon deployed by a progressive elite out to knock out potential competition.

 

As I argued:

 

The spite and the jealousy displayed by wealth tax activists toward the “rich” is no less genuine for being strategically useful. They, one part of the elite (or would-be elite), see what another part has, and they crave it for themselves. They are enraged at the thought that they have been left behind by people they see as money-grubbing moral inferiors. Their egalitarianism is a tool to create a system in which they and their acolytes take the spoils.

 

Meanwhile California’s billionaires are taking note.

 

The Wall Street Journal:

 

Billionaires are already leaving the state. California Tax Foundation visiting fellow Jared Walczak estimates in a new paper that “reported departures already total $777 billion,” and more “‘quiet departures’” that do not draw media coverage” are likely this year since “there are solid legal reasons to believe that the initiative’s residency date and approach could be challenged successfully in court.”

 

By his estimate, the wealth tax exodus could total $1.23 trillion and reduce annual state tax revenue by $3.53 billion to $4.49 billion, mainly from lower income-tax collections. He calculates that “the net present value of these ongoing losses outstrips the one-time revenue projected by the initiative’s proponents effects.” That means the tax will over time cost the state more revenue than it raises because of out-migration and slower economic growth.

 

Read on:

 

In addition, [Walczak] warns, “eroding existing tax bases could amplify the perceived ‘need’ for ongoing wealth taxation.” If voters approve the tax, expect progressives to push soon to extend it or reduce the wealth threshold at which it hits. That’s the history of income tax hikes. The referendum also lets the Legislature and Governor amend the tax, so Democrats won’t even need voter approval. [Emphasis added.]

 

Warren’s proposed tax is supposed to raise $6.2 trillion over a decade. The money is aimed not at debt reduction, but at funding new spending programs. But what if, as quite a few believe, it falls short of its revenue targets? If revenues disappoint, will spending be cut or will taxes be increased?

 

I added that that was a rhetorical question.

Progressives Give Wealth Confiscation Another Go

National Review Online

Monday, March 30, 2026

 

It’s the 2020 Democratic primaries all over again. Just as they were then, progressives are trying to one-up each other with increasingly outlandish fiscal proposals. One of the worst ideas from that year’s frenzied contest — a direct tax on household wealth — is back in fashion.

 

The same characters are back to reheat old redistribution. Senator Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.) got the ball rolling, outlining a 5 percent annual tax on all billionaires’ net worths. Not to be outdone, Senator Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) is more ambitious. Her plan is to tax all household wealth above $50 million at 2 percent each year, with a 1 percent surtax on fortunes over $1 billion. Both senators would use the proceeds not to trim the gaping deficit, of course, but to fund a laundry list of new entitlements.

 

Although Warren’s wealth tax would be slightly kinder to billionaires, it would apply to far more Americans than Sanders’s plan. Targeting what she calls “ultra-millionaires,” it would hit an estimated 260,000 households. Sanders limits his confiscatory scheme to the 900 or so billionaires in the country, though it would surely discourage more entrepreneurs and investors from joining their ranks.

 

Like today’s wealth-tax proposals, the federal income tax was originally intended to target only the richest Americans. Less than 1 percent of people paid the income tax when it was enacted in 1913, at a rate of just 1 percent of net earnings. Once the government identifies a revenue source, however, it inevitably expands: Three-fifths of households now owe income tax at marginal rates up to 37 percent.

 

Warren is expanding the wealth tax before it has even been enacted, but it could swell further. One of the senator’s top influences, the inequality-obsessed economist Thomas Piketty, once floated the idea of taxing household wealth above a threshold as low as $260,000.

 

One reason lawmakers may broaden a wealth tax is that it would raise much less revenue than advocates project. Determining the value of every asset owned by every rich household has proven an administrative nightmare for the countries that have tried. That is largely why many European governments have abolished their wealth taxes. The rich avoid assessments by shifting their money into hard-to-value assets, such as private companies, or simply by leaving the country. Admittedly, the latter risk is far smaller in the case of the United States because, after allowing for certain “breaks,” the federal government taxes its citizens and permanent residents wherever they live.

 

The United States also imposes an “expatriation tax” (to oversimplify, taxing any unrealized capital gains above a certain limit) on people renouncing their citizenship or, subject to certain time requirements, their permanent residence status. This is not enough for Warren, who would like to see a draconian 40 percent “exit tax” on those who would otherwise be subject to her tax if they renounced their citizenship.

 

If a wealth tax could somehow raise the trillions in revenue that Sanders and Warren anticipate, it would be an enormous tax on productive investment. The tax would apply to all assets regardless of when they are sold or whether they yield income. On top of regular taxes on capital gains and dividends, even a seemingly modest rate could wipe out yearly returns. Rather than reinvesting in new ventures, billionaires and millionaires would be incentivized to spend down their wealth as quickly as possible before the government nabs it. Reduced investment would dampen growth, leaving a smaller economy and lower wages for everyone.

 

Even if Congress passed a wealth tax, it could very well be blocked by the courts. The Constitution prohibits the government from levying direct taxes — including on property — without apportioning them among the states. Income taxes are allowed under the 16th Amendment, but even the most sympathetic judge would have difficulty defining unsold assets as earnings.

 

Above all, a wealth tax would be unjust because it aims to perpetrate the very expropriation that republican government exists to prevent. The purpose of the tax code is to pay for legitimate state functions, not to seize money from one set of citizens and dole it out to another. Contrary to popular belief, the richest households already contribute the bulk of federal revenue and pay higher effective tax rates than anyone else. Any leftover wealth is rightfully theirs to spend as they see fit.

 

Absent a compelling message on affordability, progressives are attempting to channel voters’ economic discontent into class resentment. But a punitive tax on the rich would do no one any good, while risking U.S. investment and competitiveness. Sober-minded Democrats should mark the wealth tax down as a liability.

The Saddest Part of This Recent Economic Lunacy

By David L. Bahnsen

Monday, January 12, 2026

 

Economic conservatives find themselves increasingly isolated in today’s politics as the reality of horseshoe theory plays out in the current populist moment. This past week, President Donald Trump explicitly suggested all four of the following policy ideas, some taken verbatim from the policy portfolio of Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren:

 

1.      An outright ban on institutional buying (if those investors own more than one hundred properties) of single-family residential real estate

 

2.      Government control of executive compensation at defense and aerospace companies, along with, under loosely defined circumstances, a ban on such companies’ returning capital (whether by share buybacks or dividends) to investors

 

3.      The implementation of quantitative easing by ordering the government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to purchase $200 billion of mortgage-backed securities

 

4.      A federally imposed limit of 10 percent on the interest rates that credit cards can charge borrowers

 

Of that list, only No. 3 is arguably allowed within the powers of the presidency (and even that only because the federal government has foolishly maintained the conservatorship of Fannie and Freddie 17 years past their demise). To the president’s credit, his Truth Social announcement regarding No. 1 (a ban on institutional ownership of residential real estate) acknowledged a need to get the codification of Congress. But even if all of these ideas go the way of his 50-year-mortgage idea of not that long ago (it has already been abandoned), even mere ideation on social media carries consequences. Not only do these proposals stroke the emotions of his populist base that demands that the government “do something,” but they offer credibility and support to future endeavors to do the same thing that may prove more serious and substantive.

 

Even if there were proof that these four policy ideas would work toward their desired aims (cheaper housing, better quality, more rapidly produced military equipment, and a lower cost of credit), significant arguments exist against their implementation. On principle, one should object (as I do) to the federal government’s telling sellers whom they can sell their homes to and telling buyers where they can and cannot put their capital to work. One should object to the concept of quasi-nationalization of our defense and aerospace industry. One should object to the distortive interference of the heavy hand of government in the supply and terms of mortgage financing. And one should object to the statist imposition of price controls in the highly complex (and risky) world of unsecured consumer credit.

 

However, I would be perfectly willing to forgo the objections of the preceding paragraph and to engage these four policy issues only along the lines of whether they are likely to work and achieve their stated aims. Indeed, these policy prescriptions not only do not work, but they actively hurt the very people they are intended to benefit.

 

In economics, we refer to the idea that some policies deserve legitimacy because of their intentions as the “piety myth.” It was Thomas Sowell who most lambasted the idea that left-wing ideas or general collectivist intentions warrant more grace as long as the policies “mean well.” With each of his proclamations, I believe the president finds political value in a midterm election year and, to some degree, believes that they would benefit, at least superficially or marginally, the people for whom they are intended. The opposite is true.

 

1.      An outright ban on major institutional buying of single-family residential real estate. Despite the fact that the very premise of the idea is deeply flawed (that institutional ownership of real estate is driving home prices higher), the solution proposed is even more problematic. The existence of more buyers in the market produces more incentive to build and develop, and if there is any viable solution to the supply–demand imbalance that has driven prices higher, it is an increase in building and development. Taking out an entire class of capital contributors to the space would put downward pressure on production. It not only takes away a category of buyers, but it limits optionality for sellers — that is, it stunts total transaction volume. More activity promotes more supply. It fosters capital formation and brings fluidity to a sector that has been hobbled by regulation and risk–reward headwinds since the financial crisis. Pricing is a by-product of supply and demand, and whether the buyers are institutions looking to add rental stock or individuals looking to enjoy a primary residence, eliminating entire actors from the marketplace pushes the supply curve the wrong way.

 

2.      Government control of executive compensation at defense and aerospace companies, along with a complete ban on such companies’ returning capital to investors. The president may have missed the ironic undermining of his own argument in his social media post. He claimed that our military equipment and defense innovations are the greatest in the world but went on to bemoan the return of capital to investors via dividends and stock buybacks, claiming that these companies ought to produce the greatest defense products in the world only because doing so is great for America. He is correct that the technology, innovation, and precision of our defense industry are the greatest in the world, and I can think of no greater way to undermine that than to treat the capital that undergirds it poorly. It is not an accident that our defense sector shines — it is well capitalized and well incentivized to perform. Nationalized defense companies in other countries trail by leaps and bounds. The investors (in both private and public companies) put forth capital that drives these innovations and continue doing so when they find the return on their investment worthwhile. Government intervention in that process would be destructive, and the wholesale elimination of capital return would stultify the sector, quasi-nationalize the space, ensure mediocrity for a generation in the ability to hire and retain talent, and freeze companies’ ability to attract capital.

 

3.      The implementation of GSE quantitative easing by ordering Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to purchase $200 billion of mortgage-backed securities. This endeavor can succeed in bringing down long-term yields as non-price-sensitive buyers overwhelm the market with mortgage bond purchases that drive prices up and yields down, but if the goal is to create greater affordability for home purchasers, this would only exacerbate the problem. Those on the right already know the talking points, having just (accurately) used them barely a year ago against then–presidential candidate Kamala Harris in the 2024 election, when she naïvely suggested subsidizing down payments for first-time homebuyers. The rebuttal, valid then as it is now, was that such a step would merely be priced into the market, fueling demand but doing nothing to address the supply side of the market’s disconnect. Much like Harris’s proposal, using the purse of government-sponsored enterprises to manipulate the mortgage market with quantitative easing fuels the demand side but does nothing to address the deficit of supply. Any action in housing policy that increases the demand curve yet ignores the supply curve would make housing more expensive, no matter how much those who might be first to benefit from lower rates would enjoy the idea.

 

4.      A federally imposed limit of 10 percent on the interest rates credit cards can charge borrowers. As was the case in Bernie Sanders’s bill from a year ago to do exactly this, this plan for federally sanctioned price-fixing ignores the obvious consequence when banks are told they cannot price the risk of this unsecured lending themselves: the wholesale removal of credit from riskier borrowers. Those with lower incomes or troubled credit histories will not enjoy 10 percent credit card interest but rather no credit card interest, because millions of borrowers will lose access to credit. Their need for borrowing will not subside, though, so they will pivot to payday lenders, pawn shops, loan sharks, or otherwise less reputable outlets at a cost far greater than they incur now. If 10 percent were the right number to meet the risk–reward trade-off of unsecured consumer lending, some bank would have already priced it right there, knowing that it is far less than what competitors currently charge, and it would soon dominate the market. JPMorgan wrote down $7 billion of charge-offs in its consumer-credit business last year, an indication of the high risk that exists in this space. That risk finds remuneration in higher interest rates, and attempts by Washington to “fix” that price would result in a huge percentage of the population’s being cut off from access to credit, an access they enjoy now as they seek to rebuild credit and financial standing.

 

Economic populism is a dangerous thing, even when its stated policies may work for a period. Being untethered to first principles leads to a slippery slope of abuse, distortion, malinvestment, and even corruption that undermines optimal conditions for human flourishing. But economic populism, as embodied in the aforementioned four policies, becomes a double whammy when it not only violates the principles of our American experiment but also woefully fails to deliver on its very own terms.

The Bernie Sanders Plan to Sabotage the Future

By Rich Lowry

Friday, December 19, 2025

 

Most people welcome economic growth, but Bernie Sanders hates it. As they say, there’s no accounting for taste.

 

The Vermont socialist has come out against data centers, the mass computing facilities essential to the development of artificial intelligence.

 

There are all sorts of NIMBY-type reasons for local residents to oppose data centers — they use a lot of energy and water, they are noisy and unsightly — but Sanders is against them on principle.

 

If he can stop the creation of new data centers, he can squeeze AI research to a standstill and supposedly save American jobs and give Congress more time to regulate the new industry.

 

When Donald Trump floated the idea of a Muslim ban during his 2016 presidential campaign, he said we needed a moratorium “until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on.”

 

In a nutshell, that’s the Sanders position on AI.

 

This might be the most poisonously stupid idea of the year.

 

The sheer destructiveness of it is on par, say, with blocking the creation of new generators after Thomas Edison set up the Pearl Street Station in 1882 on grounds that we didn’t fully understand how electrification would affect cities. Or prohibiting the mining of coal in Britain at the outset of the Industrial Revolution because the coming changes were too hard to fathom.

 

The comparison with the Industrial Revolution is apt. The benefits to Britain of leading the way were vast, in terms of economic growth, trade, the welfare of its people, and national power.

 

There is a winner-take-all aspect to these sorts of tech races. The company that takes the lead and gets people acclimated to its product earns the revenue that it can plow back into further research and development. In so doing, it maintains its lead in the market.

 

Why wouldn’t we want this company to be American rather than Chinese?

 

There will also be crucial military applications of AI. History says that a leg up in technical acumen can make the difference between victory and defeat. The Blitzkrieg swept all before it because the Nazis had figured out how to wed innovations in mobility to advances in radio communications. The British, in turn, fended off the Nazi air assault in the Battle of Britain because they made maximum use of radar without the Germans realizing it.

 

Sanders wants us to take our chances ceding a technological advantage to China and hoping everything turns out okay. The Chinese may be communists — whereas Sanders is just a socialist — but even they aren’t this foolish.

 

We are in the equivalent of a space race, and Sanders is talking about cutting off our supply of rocket fuel.

 

There may be cause eventually to regulate AI, but we don’t even know how it’s going to develop at the moment; we had to have the widespread adoption of cars before we had the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

 

Even if Sanders were to get his way, there’s no stopping AI. China and other foreign countries will continue to sprint ahead, and U.S. companies denied data centers here at home will go find them overseas.

 

McKinsey & Company estimates that $7 trillion will be invested in data centers globally by 2030, with 40 percent of that coming in the United States. This investment has already been a boon to the U.S. economy, making up for any weakness due to other factors. It’d be perverse to affirmatively seek to cut off a capital investment spigot that every other country in the world should envy.

 

The practical issues with data centers, primarily energy usage, are solvable by rationalizing our energy policies. It will be shame on us — an energy behemoth — if we can’t figure out how to power the research that might create the defining innovations of our age.

 

As for Bernie Sanders, he calls himself a progressive. Yet, his troglodyte opposition to a potential productivity revolution shows that he’s really the nation’s foremost reactionary socialist.

AOC and Bernie’s Magical Misery Tour

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, April 17, 2025

 

‘We are living in the most dangerous moment in the modern history of this country,” Senator Bernie Sanders recently proclaimed. The 20,000 or so Salt Lake City residents who squeezed into the University of Utah’s Huntsman Center were enraptured. “We are living in a moment where a handful of billionaires control our government,” he continued. “We do not want a government of the billionaire class, by the billionaire class, for the billionaire class — we want a government that represents all of us.”

 

Sanders passed the mic to his co-star, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. “We can either have extreme and growing wealth inequality with the toxic division and corruption that it requires to survive,” she warned, “or we can have a fair economy for working people along with the democracy and freedoms that uphold it.” There are only two mutually exclusive choices available to Americans now, AOC added: “Oligarchy or democracy.”

 

It’s not exactly a fresh shtick, but the progressive pair’s “Fight Oligarchy” tour is packing arenas across the country with audiences eager to hear all about how miserable everyone is — or, at least, ought to be. As is often the case with socialism, their class-conscious message suffers from a profound dearth of innovation.

 

The global stock market implodes, supply chains falter, and investors anticipate reduced corporate profits, and still, somehow, the rich are getting richer at the expense of the middle and lower class. Entrenched commercial interests object to the deregulation of their industries that allows upstart competitors to enter the market, increasing competition and putting downward pressure on consumer prices? That’s oligarchy, too. Even opportunistic sops to favored constituencies that are so economically inefficient they seem to have sprung straight from the progressive playbook can be evidence of kleptocracy if you’re clever enough. “You toss a crumb to us, and you give the farm to the big fish,” AOC said of proposals like eliminating taxes on income from tips and Social Security.

 

The stars of the “Fight Oligarchy” tour may not have the firmest grasp on sound economic policy, but they are teaching the left a lesson on markets, in a sense.

 

From the outset of the second Trump administration, the Democratic Party’s most passionate voters have found that their demand for futile, emotive gestures from their elected representatives outstripped the supply. Democratic greybeards like James Carville argued that the party would be better served by not making a spectacle of itself while it waits for the Trump administration to make an exploitable mistake. In the interim, the Trump administration has made many such mistakes. Carville’s assumption that Democratic elected leaders could capitalize on those errors was, however, too optimistic. They have tried and failed.

 

Meanwhile, the Democratic base’s desire to see their representatives self-immolate, if only to validate its members’ anxiety, has been unfulfilled. Some have tried to meet this market demand, and they have been rewarded for their efforts. But there is no substitute for the name brand in this sector, and nothing draws quite like the inchoate ardor on offer from the democratic-socialist wing of the party.

 

The mainstream press has gushed over the degree to which the “Fight Oligarchy” tour has attracted tens of thousands of progressive attendees in dark-blue metros and college towns across America. “Roughly 36,000 people in Los Angeles,” the New York Times reported. “More than 34,000 attendees in Denver. And another 30,000 on Tuesday night near Sacramento.” Sanders even made a brief guest appearance at the Coachella music festival, where he sought to convey to the youngish audience just how truly forsaken they are. The crowd ate it up.

 

That audience is right in the progressive wheelhouse. As Billboard reported, about 60 percent of Coachella attendees opted to enroll in a deferred payment plan when purchasing the concert’s tickets. Thus, the Gen Z–heavy audience attached unnecessary interest and fees onto ticket costs that already start at about $600. These concert-goers’ tenuous grasp of best financial practices renders Coachella a ripe target for progressive activism.

 

Unlike Coachella, the Sanders-AOC act isn’t primarily a hip, young experience. As the New York Post’s Kirsten Fleming wrote in a dispatch from the tour’s swing through Nampa, Idaho — home to Northwestern Nazarene University and the College of Western Idaho — the 12,500 in attendance was made up of “mostly retired Boomers.” The event had the feel of a “religious revival,” she observed; “it was their chance to be in communion with like-minded people.” And despite being bombarded with evidence of how awful everything is at the moment, the audience emerged elated. “It also felt like, dare I say, a Trump rally — only with different heroes and villains,” Fleming posited.

 

This is what our politics has become. Today, with the vast majority of voters tasked only with ratifying the verdicts rendered by an impossibly small, wildly unrepresentative cast of primary voters, American politics is a roadshow.

 

Today, like politics, the audiences for entertainment media are atomized. The proliferation of streaming services has greatly reduced the viewership required to be considered a hit. Commercial success is now measured in minutes spent rather than eyeballs attracted. Something similar might be said of national politics. A small but dedicated fan following can manufacture a cultural moment, even if most everyone else is unaware of it. And the product is increasingly tailored to the tastes not of the disaggregated majority but the fringe consumer base. That customer gets what he wants. And what he wants right now is to feel bad about the current state of affairs, so long as he gets to feel that way with the equally distraught.

 

The perverse phenomenon in which consumers of politics as a form of entertainment derive satisfaction from wallowing in catastrophism isn’t unique to progressive politics. The most plugged-in political hobbyists enjoy predictions of imminent cataclysm more than most.

 

The party out of power’s base voters always enjoy hearing about how awful things are. Typically, though, the party that is in power is leery of doom and gloom. As Karl Rove recently observed, “there’s something shocking about this White House to an old-school politico like me: It doesn’t spend much time drawing attention to the president’s successes.” Because that’s not what the base wants to hear. Unqualified accomplishments from which all benefit fail to satisfy the id. If there is no apocalypticism, no black hats and white hats, no looming Götterdämmerung in which the righteous will savor the tears of the vanquished, what’s the point?

 

That’s what the anguished are getting from Sanders and AOC. It is a retribution tour that promises to engineer a revolutionary reversal of fortunes for the elites (not our elites, of course, but theirs). There is, of course, a vague expectation among captive audiences that they will enjoy a better future, but the satisfaction is found in the expectation that all the right people will suffer soon enough.

 

Without a doubt, the “Fight Oligarchy” tour is a hit. Why wouldn’t it be? It is a formulaic rip-off of the kind of cultural fare to which modern audiences are accustomed. As much as it might seem like it is, the market for retributive paranoia is not yet saturated. And as a rule, the best performers leave them wanting more.