Back at Cornell, I majored in political science. So, I admit that I have a particular frustration every time I hear politicians, commentators and others on television talk about socialism without giving the American public any serious academic explanation of what socialism actually is.
The word has become a fear factor. It is thrown into political conversations as though simply saying "socialism" settles the argument, when in reality it should begin the discussion.
There has been a great deal of attention recently around the Democratic left and democratic socialists. I think that is a legitimate and potentially useful discussion.
But before we decide whether democratic socialism is good or bad for America, we ought to spend some time understanding what we mean by socialism.
- Is the socialism being discussed in America the socialism Karl Marx wrote about?
- Is it the socialism that developed in Germany?
- Is it what emerged in the Soviet Union, or in various countries in Latin America?
- Is it the social democracy that developed in parts of Europe?
These are not interchangeable political and economic systems and treating them as though they are does a disservice to the public.
That distinction becomes even more important because I believe we are overlooking something much closer to home. While politicians debate whether socialism is coming to America, the reality is that we already have forms of socialized economic protection in America, and we have had them for a very long time.
The more interesting question is who receives those protections and who benefits most from them. Increasingly, I believe the answer is that we have created a particularly effective form of socialism for the rich.
What Do We Mean by Socialism?
Karl Marx did not define socialism simply as government spending money or providing public services. Yet that is often how the term functions in American political debate.
A proposal involving health care, education, housing, student assistance or support for working families can quickly be labeled socialist, often without any discussion of ownership, capital or the organization of production.
The classical debate was considerably more fundamental. Marx's analysis focused heavily on the relationship between labor and capital and on who owned and controlled the means of production. In the industrial economy of his time, those means of production included factories, machinery, land and the other productive assets necessary to create economic value.
The underlying question concerned who controlled those assets, who performed the labor and who ultimately captured the wealth produced by the economic system.
That historical context matters because socialism did not subsequently develop in a single uniform way. Different countries created different political and economic arrangements under the socialist label, and some bore only a limited resemblance to what Marx had envisioned.
Social democracy developed along another path, retaining private enterprise and markets while establishing much stronger public institutions and social protections. Democratic socialism in contemporary American politics represents still another debate.
My concern is not that Americans must agree on one definition. Political ideas evolve. My concern is that we should at least understand these distinctions before we turn an academic and historical concept into a political scare word.
America Has Never Had a Pure Free Market
Once we begin looking at socialism through the questions of ownership, capital and risk, we also have to be more candid about American capitalism. The United States has never operated as a completely laissez-faire economy in which government stands outside the marketplace and simply allows private actors to succeed or fail on their own.
Government builds the infrastructure that commerce depends upon. It educates the workforce. It finances basic scientific research. It supports universities and national laboratories. It establishes and protects intellectual property. It guarantees bank deposits, purchases enormous quantities of goods and services from private companies, creates tax incentives to encourage investment and intervenes during economic crises when the collapse of a company or an industry threatens the larger economy.
Government has also played a central role in developing technologies that subsequently became the foundation for enormous amounts of private wealth.
None of this means that America is a socialist country. It means that American capitalism has always depended upon a relationship between public institutions and private capital. That is an important distinction because our political vocabulary changes depending upon who receives the government assistance.
When assistance goes to a struggling family, we are comfortable calling it welfare or an entitlement. When government provides substantial assistance to an industry or corporation, we are much more likely to call it an incentive, an investment, economic development, industrial policy or market stabilization.
Some of those descriptions are perfectly legitimate. Government sometimes should intervene to protect strategically important industries, develop new technologies or prevent an economic collapse. But we should be intellectually consistent about what is taking place. Government intervention does not stop being government intervention simply because the recipient is wealthy.
Socializing Risk While Privatizing Wealth
This brings us to what I consider one of the contradictions at the center of the American economic system. When a private company succeeds, the appreciation in that company's value belongs principally to its owners and shareholders. That is one of the fundamental principles of capitalism. People invest capital, assume risk and, when the investment succeeds, expect to receive the financial reward.
But the relationship can change dramatically when an institution becomes sufficiently large or important. If the failure of a major bank, corporation or entire industry threatens employment, financial markets, national security or the broader economy, government may decide that allowing ordinary market forces to operate would impose unacceptable consequences on everyone else. At that point, the public can become responsible for absorbing some portion of the risk.
There are circumstances in which that is necessary. My argument is not that government should stand by while an economic collapse destroys millions of jobs merely to prove its commitment to free-market theory. My question is what happens after the public assumes that risk. If taxpayers provide the capital, guarantees, research, infrastructure or emergency assistance that preserves or creates enormous private value, why should it be considered radical even to discuss what economic return the public should receive?
A private investor would certainly ask that question before committing capital. A venture capitalist would ask it. A bank would ask it.
Yet when taxpayers are the investors, we often behave as though the indirect economic benefit should always be sufficient, regardless of the amount of private wealth subsequently created.
This is what I mean when I use the phrase "socialism for the rich."
I am not suggesting that every corporate incentive or government contract is socialism. I am saying that America has become remarkably comfortable with collective action when it protects capital while remaining deeply suspicious of collective action when it protects labor.
We are willing in certain circumstances to socialize risk while allowing the resulting wealth to remain overwhelmingly private. At minimum, that contradiction deserves to be part of the discussion whenever politicians decide to lecture the public about socialism.
Artificial Intelligence Changes the Means of Production
Artificial intelligence makes this debate much more urgent because the nature of the means of production is changing. The industrial economy that informed much of nineteenth-century political thought was built around physical capital.
Factories, railroads, mines, machinery and assembly lines required enormous investments in tangible assets. Capital accumulation could certainly become concentrated, but the productive infrastructure itself was visible and physical.
The AI economy is different. Increasingly, some of the most valuable productive assets are algorithms, data, proprietary models, advanced semiconductor technology, computing capacity, intellectual property and accumulated technological knowledge.
These assets do not eliminate the need for physical infrastructure. Data centers, power systems and semiconductor fabrication facilities are extraordinarily physical and capital intensive. But the economic value increasingly comes from combining that physical infrastructure with knowledge that can be captured, replicated and deployed across markets at extraordinary speed.
That distinction is important because technological knowledge can become concentrated differently from an assembly line. A factory occupies a physical location and produces within certain physical limits.
A sufficiently powerful AI system can be incorporated into products and processes across industries and around the world. The organization controlling that system can potentially influence productivity in medicine, defense, education, finance, manufacturing, transportation, communications and countless other areas simultaneously.
This is precisely why emerging technology deserves to be discussed as part of everyday economic life rather than as a separate technology story.
STEM Life magazine's editorial mission, for example, is built around examining how artificial intelligence and emerging technologies are becoming embedded in education, careers, health, digital culture and everyday living. Once technology becomes that pervasive, the ownership of the technology becomes a social and economic question as much as an engineering question.
Who Will Own the Intelligence Economy?
The most important question about artificial intelligence, therefore, is not simply what AI will be able to do. We also have to understand who will own the productive capacity created by it.
That means examining ownership of the algorithms, models, data, computing infrastructure and intellectual property, but it also means examining ownership of the accumulated technological knowledge upon which those systems depend.
Consider what happens if AI allows a company to double its productivity while substantially reducing the amount of human labor required to produce the same output. From the standpoint of technological innovation, that may represent an extraordinary achievement.
From the standpoint of the economy, however, the story is incomplete until we understand where the additional value goes. If most of the productivity gain flows to the owners of the technology while workers absorb the displacement and communities absorb the resulting economic disruption, then technology has not simply increased productivity. It has also changed the distribution of economic power.
This is where I think the traditional discussion of the means of production becomes surprisingly relevant again. We do not have to adopt Marx's conclusions to recognize the importance of the question he was asking. Who owns the productive assets of an economy, and how does that ownership affect the distribution of the wealth the economy creates?
In the AI era, that question may become more important rather than less important because the means of production increasingly include knowledge itself.
Public Investment and Private Ownership
America's technological strength has long depended upon a partnership among government, universities, corporations, scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs.
Career Communications Group has documented that ecosystem for decades, including examples of university technology infrastructure, government-supported scientific research and public investment in emerging technologies. That relationship has produced enormous benefits, and I would not want to dismantle it in the name of ideological purity from either the left or the right.
But the emergence of AI should cause us to examine the terms of that relationship. If taxpayers finance fundamental research, support the universities educating scientists and engineers, build infrastructure, purchase technology through government contracts and assume some of the early risks associated with innovation, then the public is already participating in the creation of technological capital.
The question is whether our mechanisms for returning value to the public are adequate when that publicly supported ecosystem ultimately produces extraordinary concentrations of private wealth.
There are many possible answers. Public return can come through taxation, economic growth, employment, royalties, licensing arrangements, equity participation, affordable access to technology, workforce development requirements or entirely new mechanisms designed for the digital economy. I am not arguing here for one particular formula. I am arguing that asking the question should not be treated as an attack on capitalism.
In fact, there is a profoundly capitalist logic behind the question. If you provide capital and assume risk, you normally negotiate for a return. We should at least be willing to consider whether the American taxpayer deserves the same level of financial sophistication that we expect from every serious private investor.
The Double Standard in the Socialism Debate
This is why I become frustrated when the national conversation about socialism begins and ends with the Democratic left. Democratic socialists should absolutely be required to explain what they believe. If they want greater government ownership, they should explain what government should own and why. If they advocate redistribution, they should explain its limits and economic consequences. If they support a larger social welfare system, they should explain how it will be financed and how it will interact with private enterprise and innovation.
But intellectual consistency requires us to examine the existing system with the same rigor. We should understand how much public money supports private capital formation, how government guarantees protect markets, how tax policy encourages particular forms of investment, how publicly supported research becomes privately owned intellectual property, and how the economic rewards are distributed when those investments succeed.
Once we do that, the debate becomes much more interesting than the television version of capitalism versus socialism. We begin to see an economic system in which government and private capital are already deeply interconnected. The meaningful political question becomes not whether government participates in the economy, because it clearly does, but how it participates, whose interests are protected and how the benefits and risks of that participation are distributed.
A More Serious Conversation
I am not making an argument for abolishing capitalism. Capitalism has been an extraordinary engine of entrepreneurship, innovation and wealth creation. Nor am I suggesting that every government program benefiting business represents socialism. Political science should help us make distinctions rather than erase them.
What I am arguing for is intellectual consistency and a better public conversation.
If we are going to talk about socialism, then we should explain its history. We should explain what Marx actually argued and distinguish that from the political and economic systems subsequently built in his name. We should understand the differences among socialism, communism, social democracy and democratic socialism. We should examine the experience of different countries rather than treating Germany, Scandinavia, the Soviet Union and Latin America as though they represent one political experiment.
Then we should bring that same academic seriousness home.
We should examine who owns the means of production in the United States, who controls capital, who benefits from government intervention, who assumes economic risk and who receives the greatest share of the reward. As artificial intelligence becomes a central productive technology, that examination must expand to include ownership of algorithms, computing infrastructure, intellectual property, data and technological knowledge.
That is the debate I would like to hear the next time someone goes on television and uses socialism as a fear factor. I do not want the conversation to end because somebody said the word. I want the word to force us into a more serious discussion about political economy, ownership and power.
And every time we discuss democratic socialism, I believe we should be equally willing to discuss socialism for the rich. Not because the two are academically identical. They are not. But because a country that routinely debates collective responsibility for the needs of ordinary citizens should be equally willing to examine the collective protections it already provides to capital.
The issue ultimately is not whether America is secretly a socialist country. That is too simplistic. The more important question is whether we have constructed an economic system in which public institutions repeatedly help create, protect and rescue private wealth without having an equally serious national discussion about the public's participation in the value that results.
Artificial intelligence is going to make that question harder to avoid.
As knowledge itself becomes one of the most valuable means of production, ownership of that knowledge will help determine who accumulates wealth and power in the decades ahead. Before we allow "socialism" to remain nothing more than a political scare word, we should understand that the much larger debate is already taking place around us.
It is a debate about who owns the future, who pays for its creation and who ultimately gets to share in what that future produces.