> but who decides how those resources are deployed
The current system selects people that have allocated resources effectively in the past by providing them more resources to allocate.
> We've ran high-risk R&D projects successfully before as public projects
And what is stopping countries from doing this today? This isn't an either or thing, public projects can still exist, there is no law of nature saying that massive companies are the sole source of innovations but for some reason people treat it like they are mutually exclusive. You bring up projects from decades ago but are there any modern examples?
Since when has throwing money at systems that haven't shown success worked? And you are suggesting that we take money from others to throw it at a system that doesn't work.
"Allocated resources effectively" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in your description. The current system also rewards large-scale cons and rent extraction with the political power to do more of the same.
It is classic circular reasoning. Why should they have all money? Well because they are the best ones at allocating the resources. How do we know they are best at allocating resources? Because they have all the money.
"To him that hath, more shall be given
and to him that hath not, more shall be taken away"
I suppose it was more popular in seemingly simpler times when the playing field was more even and the players more evenly matched and distributed. But here we are in the future, and that game seems to have been concluded.
I myself rather preferred the view from the shoulders of giants than the undersides of their feet.
There is a agent simulation paradigm where a large amount ofagents engage in one-on-one transactions and wealth is transferred. I haven't followed but decades ago there was a simulation where with rather simpler rules, in the end all the wealth concentrated to one agent.
In this model, it's the rules of the game, not the morality of the players that causes the effects.
It seems you're implying that since being a billionaire is not 100% heritable, it must be a result of individual merit (leap 1) which is purely synonymous with skillfully allocating resources (leap 2) more than any other type of person (leap 3) rather than any other explanation for how they got there, say, sociopathy, right place right time, etc.
> It seems you're implying that since being a billionaire is not 100% heritable, it must be a result of individual merit
Nope, another strawman, I never claimed it was 100% merit. You claimed that wealth is purely heritable which is easily proven false by observing reality.
> sociopathy
So your claim is that sociopathy is more important for getting rich than skill?
> right place right time
Choosing the right business to build given the state of the world is a skill. Business requires luck the same way poker requires luck, and let me tell you, if you play poker vs a skilled player you will lose a lot of money.
Yes exactly. Also, we should stop pretending that the money supply is fixed and that everyone exists on the same monetary playing field.
Arguments about efficient allocation are laughable when you consider that someone who is socially 6 steps removed from an institutional 'money printer' lives in a monetary environment where money is 10 times more scarce than it is at the source (due to taxation between each hop). Few people are so far removed in practice but the effects are still very powerful even with less distance. Taxation brings all economic activities closer to the government and banking sector.
In competitive industries were profits are paper thin, monetary asymmetry can fully determine business outcomes. The company receiving government contracts on the side has a massive upper hand over its competitors during a monetary contraction. Same can be said about companies which operate in environments where their customers have access to large amounts of credit by virtue of their highly valued collateral. Their success has little to do with optimal allocation and a lot to do with socio-economic positioning and monetary system design.
> The current system also rewards large-scale cons and rent extraction
I never claimed it was a perfect system and I am more than willing to admit rent extraction, scams, and monopoly power are massive issues with capitalism. It still hasn't been shown that replacing that with government is better.
> You bring up projects from decades ago but are there any modern examples?
There are no modern examples in the USA precisely because there is no political will to fund them. That political will is undermined because private companies are large and strong enough that they can influence politicians and prevent projects they they would have to compete with.
Your argument has the implication the wrong way around.
Meanwhile, look at China. The vast majority of China's cometlike economic success can be directly attributed to state funding, and many of its successful projects are directly state-run. That's because China still plays industrial politics that are concerned with economic growth and public welfare instead of rent-seeking.
> The current system selects people that have allocated resources effectively in the past by providing them more resources to allocate.
The current system selected people that have maximized shareholder value and financially engineered it into other financial assets that provide power under the capitalist system. This includes private equity services that have simply squeezed money out of consumers for no increase in quality of life, or companies that managed to avoid the consequences of the externalities of their economic activity.
> And what is stopping countries from doing this today? This isn't an either or thing, public projects can still exist, there is no law of nature saying that massive companies are the sole source of innovations but for some reason people treat it like they are mutually exclusive. You bring up projects from decades ago but are there any modern examples?
Regulatory capture and lobbying that attempts to force a profit motive behind every large government initiative when the profit motive substracts value away from society at large.
To be concrete, I guess in a different time and society someone like Sam Altman would have been a successful politician or perhaps like Hyman Rickover or Marcel Boiteux working within the government to cause colossal steps in progress.
The current system selects people that have allocated resources effectively in the past by providing them more resources to allocate.
> We've ran high-risk R&D projects successfully before as public projects
And what is stopping countries from doing this today? This isn't an either or thing, public projects can still exist, there is no law of nature saying that massive companies are the sole source of innovations but for some reason people treat it like they are mutually exclusive. You bring up projects from decades ago but are there any modern examples?
Since when has throwing money at systems that haven't shown success worked? And you are suggesting that we take money from others to throw it at a system that doesn't work.