[ben_w]

Planned economies are associated with communism, but they're also basically what all corporations do internally, including government owned "corporations" like the police and militaries.

Food gets massive subsidies in the west, because we really don't want shortages, and even massive subsidies are a really cheap way to do that, because most of the consumer cost of food is later in the supply chain than the production.

My gut feeling (I'm neither an economist nor a political student) is that while many small corporations competing with each other is an excellent way to explore the space of supply, demand, and technological changes, when you find a known-good solution it's probably better to merge them into one to get rid of the needless duplication — which happens naturally in capitalism, but then I'd go further and say the government should buy up the shares and take advantage of any dividends to (effectively) be a non-tax based revenue source.

[gruez]

>then I'd go further and say the government should buy up the shares and take advantage of any dividends to (effectively) be a non-tax based revenue source.

Isn't that just a consumption/sales/value added tax with extra steps?

[ben_w]

If it is any of those kinds of tax, then so are all divided payments; this is something a corporation could just decide not to pay one year because it wants the money for investing in future growth or whatever else is the usual reason is for not paying dividends to shareholders.