Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) has another in a long line of terrible ideas: a mandated 32-hour workweek .

The geriatric career politician who honeymooned in the Soviet Union and never met a communist he didn’t like tweeted Monday: “It’s time for us to move to a 32-hour work week with no loss in pay. We can reduce the stress level in our country and allow Americans to enjoy a better quality of life.”

Sanders, a true socialist believer, has always taken an all-gas, no-brakes approach to policy proposals. While he and the rest of the Democratic Party’s left flank made hay with the slogan “fight for 15” during the 2016 presidential primaries, Sanders and friends have already transitioned to a push for a $17 minimum hourly wage . If that doesn’t hook in economically illiterate young voters, perhaps a massive minimum wage hike plus reducing the workweek to four days will finally endear the 81-year-old senator to the youths on college campuses everywhere.

Moving past the fact that both of Sanders’s absurd proposals are dead on arrival, encouraging people to work less is not the prescription for what ails an economy that is already teetering on a razor’s edge. The logistics alone make a shortened workweek impossible. Supply chain problems have plagued the economy off and on since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic in early 2020, and that is with every trucker in the country working a whole lot more than 32 hours per week to keep grocery store shelves stocked.

Innovation matters little to Marx and Lenin admirers such as Sanders, but America was built on the backs of people willing to go above and beyond the output of a standard workweek. Elon Musk famously works 100 hours a week between Tesla, SpaceX, and newly purchased Twitter . Former Apple CEO Steve Jobs claimed to work every day from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m. Your favorite boxer is up at 4 a.m. getting a few miles in before training, and NFL teams are sometimes fined for overworking their players during the offseason in order to gain a competitive advantage.

Artists almost never limit themselves to a 32- or even 40-hour workweek. From novelists to musicians, the people who bring us the art we love are notoriously hardworking. When I am in a recording studio working on a new album with my band, we routinely put in 80-plus hours per week, and the workload is even larger when performing live on tour.

Sanders is correct that people are stressed and that our quality of life has suffered over the past few years, but if the senator were serious about helping workers, he would press his colleagues in Congress to stop recklessly spending their money. The ruling class is to blame for skyrocketing prices, unaffordable interest rates, and the stress that comes along with heavy tax burdens and a cascade of bank failures . Get the government off of people’s backs and let people work, innovate, and build, unmolested by tyrants such as Sanders and their worn-out, childish ideas.

Brady Leonard ( @bradyleonard ) is a musician, political strategist, and host of The No Gimmicks Podcast .