My theory (maybe it’s not a theory maybe it’s obvious) is that students and people in their twenties are more given to “big government” idealism because they were only recently living at home - maybe still are - where, even if they had terrible parents (maybe especially if they had terrible parents) it’s easy to believe “if only the people in charge were good everything would had been so much better”. Of course, there’s very little in even a healthy childhood that properly models the importance of “balance of power”. Parents are good parents or bad parents, but they are always “in charge” just by virtue of the dynamic between adults and children. I can see how young people end up believing it would just take a “good parent” to fix so much that’s wrong about the way things run. Unfortunately no group of adults has ever had “total” control over a country without it in some way going to total shit. Realising the reality of this is I think one of those moments when you actually grow up.
Good luck convincing everyone to democratically support the same authoritarianism that would be required to pull that off while everything slowly falls apart. It would be chaos.
Half of America losing their minds and voting for a trump administration is in fact further proof you’d have civil war before you had a “100% planned economy”. People are provably irrationally selfish. Even in times of national emergency (cf covid etc)
A 100% planned economy could handle the labor/production problems.
A 100% planned economy has never worked, ever. And concentrating all that power in one place? Yeah that’ll end well.
My theory (maybe it’s not a theory maybe it’s obvious) is that students and people in their twenties are more given to “big government” idealism because they were only recently living at home - maybe still are - where, even if they had terrible parents (maybe especially if they had terrible parents) it’s easy to believe “if only the people in charge were good everything would had been so much better”. Of course, there’s very little in even a healthy childhood that properly models the importance of “balance of power”. Parents are good parents or bad parents, but they are always “in charge” just by virtue of the dynamic between adults and children. I can see how young people end up believing it would just take a “good parent” to fix so much that’s wrong about the way things run. Unfortunately no group of adults has ever had “total” control over a country without it in some way going to total shit. Realising the reality of this is I think one of those moments when you actually grow up.
The people who could singlehandedly run a country in a good way are the ones that have the least motivation to do so.
Good luck convincing everyone to democratically support the same authoritarianism that would be required to pull that off while everything slowly falls apart. It would be chaos.
Did you see the US election results yet?
Half of America losing their minds and voting for a trump administration is in fact further proof you’d have civil war before you had a “100% planned economy”. People are provably irrationally selfish. Even in times of national emergency (cf covid etc)
We’d probably go full totalitarian first, plague second.