This post is precisely about a free market economy where the (imo unnatural) disconnect between working in an enterprise and owning the products of that enterprise doesn't exist. That's all.
Not sure what "command economy" has to do with it.
If you hire a landscaper to redo the landscaping of your property, is he thereby entitled to own a share of your property? How about the guy you hired to fix your water heater? Does he get a share, too? Is that natural?
And if so it could be considered a (very) generous decision more often than not.
Hiring a worker to help your business is employment
I'm sure I don't have to explain the differences between a transaction and employment?
At no point I advocated for a command economy, once more you reply to a strawman to one of my comments, Walter.
The government funded Langley with $60,000 to build a working airplane. It fell into the Potomac "like a sack of wet cement".
The Wrights spent $3,000 and build a working, flying airplane.
The jet engine was invented and developed with private funds. The US government told Lockheed to stop working on jet engines and develop better piston engines instead.
AI, the biggest tech revolution in a couple decades, seems to have been privately funded.
Compilers, which you work with your whole life, came from research done by public funds.
Most medical research has been done with public funds.
Radios, modems, every single piece of networking we currently use was first researched by public funds.
We can keep cherry-picking examples if you wish go down this road, it doesn't foster much of a deeper discussion though if you are going to keep your dogma.
Public funding is necessary, private funding is necessary, what kind of system we can create that enables the best out of both worlds to evolve and be better? That's a discussion I'd like to see, this end of history bullshit is too boring, and tiring to discuss.
Capitalism as it is has empirically shown it's not the best system humanity should rely on, it has its advantages, it has major flaws, admitting that is a pretty good first step into trying to look what's next, how do we go from here. It's destructive, it's inhumane, it's simplistic, it will become a relic just like any other system that came before.
Being dogmatic about it doesn't take us anywhere, it just conserves a status quo which is not the best we can achieve.
As usual, I think you are a bright person, Walter, you've done tons and achieved a lot more than most, but keeping this dogmatic narrow-view of the world certainly pains me, exactly because you are the kind of mind that should be able to see through the bullshit...
It was an incremental step, followed by other incremental steps. There have also been many, many internets along the way: AOL, Prodigy, BYTEnet, MCI, Gopher, RBBS, etc. Every organization that had more than one computer soon figured out how to connect them. Even I did that.
BTW, Ethernet was invented by Xerox. I use it every day.
Compilers appeared shortly after computers that were capable enough to run them appeared. This suggests an inevitability, not a discontinuous invention. Jet engines were a discontinuity, too.
What I see is that if invention X is derived from inventions A,B,C,D,E,F, and D was funded by the government, the government gets all the credit.
> Capitalism as it is has empirically shown it's not the best system humanity should rely on,
How has that been shown?
> it has its advantages, it has major flaws, admitting that is a pretty good first step into trying to look what's next, how do we go from here. It's destructive, it's inhumane, it's simplistic, it will become a relic just like any other system that came before.
Show an example of any system working better.
Free markets are a chaotic system of creative destruction. There have been endless attempts at "fixing" that. None have worked better.
I tend to take a step back and keep in mind that Free Enterprise is not inherently a part of Capitalism and vice-versa. They've gone together pretty well but each might do better with a different partner or different arrangement altogether.