The Wall Street Journal editorial board has just catalogued, with evident dismay, the equity stakes, golden shares, and revenue‑sharing demands its own party has already imposed on the AI industry. Now, in “The Road to AI State Socialism,” it warns that Bernie Sanders wants to do the same — and calls the thing his party built a socialist expropriation. The editorial is not wrong about the danger. It is wrong about who built the road.
I will grant the Journal its strongest honest point, because a prosecutor who cannot name the other side’s case is a propagandist. A 50 percent equity tax is, in substance, a taking. The Fifth Amendment says what it says, and a compulsory transfer of half a company’s shares to the government without cash compensation falls within the plain meaning of “nor shall private property be taken for public use without just compensation.” The Journal is correct that a “one‑time 50 percent tax” paid in equity is expropriation under a different name, and correct that sovereign wealth funds without the discipline of democratic control tend to become slush funds for the politically connected.
But the editorial is unserious about power, which is the one thing a conservative editorial page used to worry about above all others. It catalogs President Trump’s equity stakes, golden shares, revenue‑sharing conditions on chip exports, and direct investments in critical minerals and coal plants — and then treats them as embarrassing exceptions to a rule the Journal still imagines itself to defend. They are not exceptions. They are the rule now, and the rule was made by the same party whose editorial page spent forty years arguing that a free market requires widely‑distributed property, local control, and a government small enough to drown in a bathtub. The distance between that argument and a president who conditions an export license on a fifteen‑point revenue cut is not measured in degrees. It is measured in worlds.
The editorial’s real grief is not that the government owns things. It is that a socialist wants the government to own things for the wrong reasons — for redistribution rather than for industrial policy, for workers rather than for national champions. This is not a defense of private property. It is a property‑line dispute between two factions of the same coalition, both of which have already agreed that the government will own and direct the commanding heights of the economy.
What neither faction will say, because saying it would indict the entire political economy they have built together, is that the concentration that makes AI state socialism thinkable is the same concentration a genuinely conservative movement would have broken up decades ago. The reason a handful of companies can develop artificial intelligence at all — the reason the capital requirements are so vast that only a government or a sovereign wealth fund can credibly claim a stake — is that the antitrust enforcement, the local banking system, the dispersed ownership structure, and the Main Street economy a serious conservatism would have defended were all dismantled, one merger and one deregulation at a time, by the very party whose editorial page now discovers the dangers of concentrated economic power. The same concentration that shuttered the Verso mill in Wisconsin Rapids in 2020 and took nearly a thousand jobs — the same logic that turned the family farm into a contract‑grower and the Main Street bank into a branch of a national behemoth — is now producing an AI industry that can be owned only by giants. You cannot cheer the consolidation of every sector into three players, celebrate the financialization of every human need, permit a handful of technology platforms to become the infrastructure of daily life, and then express surprise when the government wants its cut. The cut is the logic of the consolidation. Ownership concentration invites ownership capture. The shareholder model invites the sovereign shareholder.
I used to trade agricultural futures, and I know the logic. When a commodity is abstracted from the field — when the corn, the cattle, the beans become paper positions rather than the work of actual families on actual ground — the people who own the paper eventually own everything else. The farmers who grew the crop become contractors; the town that shipped it becomes a warehouse district; the bank that lent against it is absorbed by a regional chain that is absorbed by a national behemoth; and one day a senator from Vermont, surveying the wreckage of dispersed ownership, proposes that the government take the stake that the local bank, the family farm, and the independent business used to hold. The senator is not imagining a new order. He is formalizing the existing one. The editorials that mourn the formalization while defending the consolidation that made it inevitable are not conserving anything. They are writing the obituary and calling it a principle.
The Church has always understood this. Quadragesimo Anno warned in 1931 that it is “a grave evil” for higher bodies to absorb what lesser ones can do, and the lesser entity here is not the corporation or the government. It is the family, the parish, the cooperative, the town. When those are healthy, no sovereign wealth fund is necessary because the wealth is already sovereign in the people who hold it. When they are hollowed out, the wealth flows upward, and the only remaining question is which distant authority will manage it — the fund manager in New York or the fund manager in Washington. The choice between them is a choice between two forms of concentration, and a conservatism that cannot imagine a third form has already surrendered the argument it claims to defend.
The third form is neither the sovereign wealth fund nor the unaccountable corporation. It is the cooperative, the credit union, the mutual, the locally‑owned utility, the farm held in trust for the next generation — the distributed ownership that centralizes nothing and roots everything in the community that bears its consequences. The Adams‑Columbia Electric Cooperative, headquartered right here in Friendship, Wisconsin, serves some 31,500 member‑owners across twelve counties. It was built by farmers who pooled their resources because no for‑profit utility would string wire to spread‑out homesteads. The farm supply co‑op I manage is owned by the farmers who use it: one member, one vote, profits returned to members rather than extracted by distant shareholders. Neither institution requires a sovereign wealth fund because the sovereignty is already held locally, in the people whose lives depend on the decisions these institutions make. Neither institution appears in the Journal’s editorial because neither institution fits the binary the Journal has accepted — a binary in which the only possible owners are Wall Street and Washington, and the only possible argument is over which of them gets the bigger cut.
The Journal’s editorial board speaks, in its own words, for “free markets and free people.” A free people does not hold its liberty at the sufferance of a sovereign wealth fund, and it does not hold its liberty at the sufferance of a handful of technology platforms that have replaced the Main Street bank, the local newspaper, and the independent farm. A free people holds its liberty in the things it owns together, locally, at a scale small enough to manage and large enough to matter. The editorial page that defends the concentration that destroyed those things, and then deplores the government capture that follows the concentration as its natural consequence, is not defending freedom. It is defending a property regime that has already sold the only freedom that counts.
The earth was given for all, and any political economy that cannot reckon with that prior truth will eventually find itself arguing over who gets to manage the server farm that replaced the family farm, as if the replacement were inevitable and the only question were the logo on the door. It was not inevitable. The server farm was built on a foundation of shattered local ownership, and a conservatism that means anything would be rebuilding the foundation instead of arguing over who gets to hang a flag on the roof.