Anybody can compete, but apparently most of us choose not to. Who forces a young talent to settle for a job instead of taking the risk to innovate ? Maybe risk-taking for innovation is what could be the encouraged through taxation.
That's what some EU members think. Ask us how that's going :)
That's why most of the big and wealthy companies hare are around 100 years old or more, vs about 30 years old in the US.
Here in Austria you can get various government and EU grants for your startup and tax waivers on social security, and if by some miracle, you don't crash and burn like 95% of startups and manage to produce a semi-profitable company in the end, then you have to pay to the government retroactively all the social security contributions and taxes that have been previously waived over the past years, which is the final nail in the coffin for most companies here never growing or scaling beyond a couple of guys from uni in an apartment kind of company.
Therefore most of the innovation happens nearly exclusively within academia, as "outside" it's a pretty hostile tax environment that mostly favors those 100 year old companies that already have solid revenue streams.
I think that taxing large companies more than small ones might. The bedrock of capitalism is competition, and that is significantly stifled if big players with large amounts of capital can simply buy out anything innovative.
But I don't think we are evolved enough to deal yet. We'd just end up in a communist prison life or something as people selfishly try to get more for themselves. Roddenberry thought an event like finding extraterrestrial life would be the push humans need, but I'm not so sure anymore.
but dont quote me.
its also a plot device to let them talk about economics.