You just described Lucent.
Vision for the future is limited to grandiose fantasies straight out of 1950s pulps and the "heroic" creation of narcissistic corporations that are cynically extractive and treat employees and customers with equal contempt.
The differences which used to provide a convincing cover story - no single Great Leader, a functional consumer economy, votes that appear to make a difference - are being dismantled now.
What's left are the same mechanisms of total monitoring (updated with modern tech) and reality-denying totalitarian oppression, run for the exclusive benefit of a tiny oligarchy which self-selects the very worst people in the system.
This is only an illusion created by the fact that the communists were careful to rename all important things, to fool the weaker minds that the renamed things are something else than what they really are.
In reality, the "socialist" economies were more capitalist than the capitalist economies of USA and Western Europe. They behaved exactly like the final stage of capitalism, where monopolies control every market and there is no longer any competition.
Unfortunately, after a huge sequence of mergers and acquisitions started in the late nineties of the last century, the economies of USA and of the EU states resemble more and more every year the former socialist economies, instead of resembling the US and W. European economies of a few decades ago.
Witness the people who keep proposing to solve market consolidation with higher taxes. Higher taxes go to the government, and therefore the interests that have captured the government. Are we going to solve it by taking money from Warren Buffet and giving it to Larry Ellison? Do we benefit from increased funding for Palantir? No, you have to break up the consolidated markets through some combination of antitrust enforcement and peeling back the regulatory capture that prevents new competitors from entering the market.
There is at least a chance for it to be redistributed, unlike private wealth.
Social security is the biggest of them. Older people have more wealth than younger people on net and social security is structured to make higher payments to people who made more money when they were younger, which is significantly correlated with having more wealth right now. So it's a massive transfer payment system that transfers money from the poor to the rich. Meanwhile it uses its own special tax which is significantly more regressive than the ordinary income tax and doesn't tax corporate income at all. Notice in particular that we could instead be solving "grandma doesn't starve" with a UBI that makes uniform payments to everyone and not disproportionate payments to the rich, and comes from a tax which is also paid by corporations.
Net interest is a naked transfer to people with enough capital to invest in government bonds.
Most of the military and VA budgets go to government contractors who work hard to sustain an uncompetitive bidding process with thick margins.
Medicare uses the same bad tax as social security and those dollars go to the healthcare industry which has thoroughly captured the government. The AMA lobbies to limit the number of medical residency slots and sustain a doctor shortage and healthcare corporations have established a thicket of laws to limit competition, impair price transparency and promote over-consumption.
That's where the majority of the government budget goes, and the remaining minority of the money is also going in significant part to government contractors and regulatory capture industries. The government takes tax money from the middle class and gives it to the rich and huge corporations.
We don't need any more "redistribution" like that. If you think you can get the government to stop doing that and instead give the money the poor and middle class then first prove you can do it with the existing money before even thinking about collecting more. You have a nutrient deficiency because you're infested with tapeworms, not because you don't have enough food.
This is very complex problem that needs to be tackled from all sides simultaneously, the entrenched interests are already well setup to defend themselves.
Which is a bigger problem, that corporations can pay for political ads, or that one corporation has 90% search market share? That there are political ads on Facebook or Twitter, or that those corporations control what's in the feed of hundreds of millions of people because use of their algorithm is tied to the network effect instead of having a federated system like RSS or email?
Furthermore, Citizen's United makes it harder to make any necessary legislative changes. Including the anti-trust. Focusing only on one issue while leaving the other heads of the hydra intact just plays into its strengths.
Suppose you don't own a major media outlet or social media company and you have something to say that the major media outlets and social media companies don't like. What are your options for getting more than six people to hear what you have to say if you're not allowed to spend money?
> It is a standard practice to drown the unwanted speech in the noise of the paid-for 'speech'.
This is literally the opposite of what happens. The companies that own distribution channels can make speech they don't like disappear, or even just speech that doesn't drive sufficient "engagement", by putting it at the end of the feed behind six trillion lolcats and enough rage bait to keep everyone glued to the screen. Then the only way to be seen when your message isn't a dopamine hit is to pay money.
> Furthermore, Citizen's United makes it harder to make any necessary legislative changes. Including the anti-trust.
Citizens United has very little to say about anti-trust. What argument are you making that it would prevent e.g. laws requiring adversarial interoperability or break ups of large companies? For that matter, much of the interoperability problem comes from companies using laws like the CFAA and DMCA 1201, and then you don't even need laws to be passed, you need them to be repealed.
Isn't it absolutely obvious? Are you paid bot?
Meanwhile you don't need the government to use tax dollars to buy stocks in specific companies. If you want a UBI then use VAT. Then it comes from every company instead of having government bureaucrats choose which ones, and gets paid out immediately instead of needing a generation of build-up.
Inequality society producea inequal economy (and vice versa) which is the economy of any developing country. Few rich,. miniscule middle class and lots of poor people in slums snd poverty.
thought about this too - but not as expressively as you put it.
e.g in China - for early stage ventures - there's cut throat competition - then as Thiel would put it with heavy competition profits trend towards 0 - by then the tech is perfected or close to perfect - then the state uses its funds to back a monopoly. that's how you get a BYD.
While it sounds counter intuitive, it maintains a good distribution of talent across the industry.
But that system would only work if healthy competition was the goal, not moneymaking.
Suppose someone new made a better mobile OS than Android. What would happen?
Google has convinced a lot of third party apps to use their anti-competitive attestation system that has no real security value but makes it so those apps won't run on a competing operating system even if it implements all of the same APIs, so it immediately has a major barrier to gaining traction. That should be an antitrust violation.
Then the incumbents would copy any innovative features the new OS has so it no longer has an advantage. On paper this is what the patent system is supposed to prevent, but in practice is does the opposite. If you as a practicing entity tried to sue a major incumbent for patent infringement, they would counter-sue and have an arsenal of thousands of patents that could keep you bogged down in litigation for years. Just the cost of litigation could bankrupt a smaller company even if they won, and there is enough ambiguity in the system that they're pretty likely to lose when the incumbent only has to find one patent out of thousands they were unintentionally infringing, or a court is willing to enforce one that ought not to have been granted. So then everyone has to file a bunch of patents for the purposes of mutually-assured destruction and can't really enforce them, which favors larger companies that can afford the overhead. It certainly doesn't protect the little guy and we would be better off without them.
Your suggestion is also essentially unworkable. NFL teams all have the same number of players and play the same game. Amazon and TSMC each have a very different business and largely aren't competing for the same people. Does Garmin get the same number of picks as Foxconn even though they don't employ nearly as many people? How many picks does a startup get? Do we count Apple as doing poorly because the gross margins on hardware are lower than they are on pure licensing, or Nvidia as doing poorly because they have higher margins but lower revenue? How are we accounting for engineers in other countries? What about engineers in China who work for companies in China who are contractors for international companies? What if a corporate contractor has more than one corporate customer? How do we account for open source? How do we distinguish engineers from IT staff or research mathematicians or prevent companies from giving willing workers a job description that doesn't match the work they're doing?
It's also probably worth pointing out that systems like that are essentially price fixing schemes by the industry to pay workers less than they would otherwise be able to get if other companies weren't prohibited from outbidding them for talent.
In general productive economic activity generates a surplus and that surplus allows for slack. Human beings intuitively understand this. Hobbies are frequently de facto training for things that aren't currently happening but might later. Family-owned and operated businesses are much less likely to try to outsource their core competency for the sake of quarterly profits.
But regulatory capture and market consolidation causes the surplus to go to the corporate bureaucracies capturing the regulators instead of human beings with self-determination and goals other than number go up, and then the system optimizes for capturing the government rather than satisfying the people. "When you legislate buying and selling the first things to be bought and sold are the legislators." You throw away the competitive market and subject yourselves to the unaccountable bureaucracy, and then try to pretend it's not the same thing because this time the central planners are wearing business suits.