> The rich and powerful are fully in favor of a strong, powerful state-run economy that serves their needs. That's why it's done under the rubric of military spending -- "we have to spend trillions of taxpayer dollars on this because we have to defend ourselves" sounds better than "because we need it to produce the Silicon Valley economic miracle."

Why don't we go back to funding moonshot projects instead, then? Let's see Apollo Program/Human Genome Project-level spending on Next-generation sequencing (protein and RNA included), novel propulsion engines for deep space probes, battery research, materials, etc. If we spent the same money on pressing problems, we could support the science and tech sectors all the while doing incredible societal good.