You seen to think "Campaign finance has never been shown to corrupt the political process in the US.". I think you're an idiot, but you're allowed your opinion.
You're welcome to present data to the contrary. Until then, you are the idiot who presents his misinformed opinions as fact.
While tourism is valuable, it does come 2nd place to having a place to live.
Really? If it always comes "2nd place", why have hotels at all? Why not convert all hotels into apartments? Who decides?
People NEED somewhere to live for a stable society and healthy cities.
The problem with places like San Francisco is an imbalance between jobs, housing, and other demands on space. Since the decision on tradeoffs between these different demands are pretty much entirely made by government in San Francisco, that imbalance is clearly the fault of government, not of developers, AirBnB, property owners, or anybody else. So, given a decades long history of failed city planning that has created the current mess, the idea that limiting AirBnB rentals is going to address these problems is ludicrous.
Except, by your definition, most of Europe is governed by Socialists, and the most Socialist countries in Europe (the Northern European ones) are doing fine.
"By my definition"? We are talking about societies that have abolished money and consumer markets. Have any of the European nations abolished money and consumer markets? No. So, that's not what we are talking about here. Even socialist East Germany, which I gave as an example, wasn't as extreme as Roddenberry's fiction.
Also, Western European economies are "social market economies" not "socialist"; they have money, private ownership of the means of production, and mostly free exchange of goods and services. Switzerland, Ireland, Estonia, and the UK have more economic freedom than the US.
Again with the moving goalposts. First the Federation is terrible because it has secret police, now it's terrible because it has a different problem (but it still has secret police).
I never said the Federation was terrible "because it has a secret police". It was you who started talking about a "secret police" not me.
You have yet to give any examples of someone telling a Federation citizen where to live, what job to take, or what housing to live in except in a military context.
That is my point: Roddenberry didn't show that because, like you, he didn't understand the consequences of the economic and social system he postulated. That is, Roddenbery's depiction of human society is absurd; humans and human societies don't function that way and never will.
So there's no poverty, there's so much stuff that any individual human has more consumer goods then they could possibly use, the ambitious can shine in Starfleet; and that's somehow a bad thing?
Yes, indeed. And that's why I brought up East Germany: to a medieval peasant, it would have looked like the pinnacle of freedom and wealth, but compared to its contemporary democratic free market societies, it was a poverty stricken totalitarian shithole. When you look at humanity in Star Trek, you are like a medieval peasant looking at East Germany: you erroneously think those people must be wealthy and free.
So airbnb demand is going up, and it lets property owners charge far more than long term renters pay,
Property owners charge more to short term renters than to long term renters because short term renting is riskier.
and you somehow think it isn't responsible at all for the housing prices and shortage problem? Not even a bit?
Short term housing and long term housing are indeed in competition for housing units; but based on what do you prefer one to the other? Why is it better to arbitrarily force property owners to allocate more resources to long term housing and fewer to short term housing?
In any case, the massive housing shortage and astronomical housing prices in places like San Francisco has nothing to do with AirBnB since it existed long before. The reason for that is much simpler: voters vote to create housing shortages because they see it in their own interest. It's highly dysfunctional, but voters in places like San Francisco only have themselves to blame.
First peoples' taxes will not go up as people will not be taxed. Businesses will take on the tax load as well as the rich. Because the masses will have more money to spend the sales taxes and income taxes paid by the businesses will generate more wealth than the wealth formerly garnered from taxing workers.
Taxation and spending don't generate wealth. The only thing that generates wealth is actually producing something valuable.
Basic income can replace most other assistance programs like food stamps and homeless shelters. These programs employee a large number of government bureaucrats and enforcement officers
Except... that's not going to happen. These are lots of well organized people with lots of lobbying power, and they aren't going to let you or anybody else take away their cushy jobs. Furthermore, we have all these people there precisely because voters and politicians have decided time and again that a simple cash benefit program isn't going to cut it.
Furthermore, cost of living varies widely across the country; how are you going to deal with that? I mean, a $10000 UBI is below the federal poverty line, and you can't possibly live on that in many metropolitan areas. Will UBI recipients have to pay full price for health insurance or are you still going to subsidize that?Are you going to give UBI to every adult, or even person, or what? Do people living together each get their own UBI? What possible criteria are you going to use to decide this?
Apart from the fact that your numbers don't add up and that it would wreck the economy, you have a more fundamental misunderstanding...
There won't be an exodus when you do that, because the first law would ensure that leaving the U.S. would cost more than it would likely save over the life of the investor.
See, things don't work that way in the real world. People fleeing the East Bloc had to leave almost all their personal possessions; they still escaped to the West. Why? Because they correctly reasoned that they would be far better off starting from scratch in an economy that actually works and lets them accumulate wealth. Likewise, except for inept trust fund kids and the elderly, most working age rich people are going to reason that a political system that has gone off the rails in the way you propose is just going to continue to wreck their lives, and that they are going to be better off starting from scratch somewhere else than wait for you to take ever more of their hard earned money.
To put this differently, the fact that our politicians are corrupted by money is something we should address by punishing the politicians, not by taking away the right of law-abiding citizens and organizations to engage in free speech.
Furthermore, Hillary Clinton is an excellent example of the kind of corruption we are seeing in US politics today: she and her husband have translated public office into personal wealth and power, while attempting to use campaign laws to suppress opinions critical of Hillary. That kind of conduct by public officials is what we should punish, and punish severely.
And-- repeating aagin what I said back at the very beginning of this thread--the thing about corporations is that they have lawyers. Lawyers are very good at finding loopholes. The loophole in that "corporations can't fund candidates" is that corporations can fund Political Action Committees. Which, it turns out, is a very effective way of funding a campaign.
Yes, you are repeating yourself, and your statement is as wrong as it was at the beginning: PACs aren't a "loophole"; what they can and cannot do is part of campaign finance law. Campaign finance has never been shown to corrupt the political process in the US.
There is too much money in politics, but it isn't in campaign finance. Where it actually exists is in the connections between public officials, corporations, lobbyists, and non-profits. Hillary Clinton is a prime example of that kind of corruption, selling herself to corporations and running a billion dollar foundation soliciting "donations" from the people she interacts with as a public servant. Those are the activities that we should make illegal.
On Wednesday three prominent U.S. Senators "called for a regulatory probe into whether short-term rental websites such as Airbnb are taking housing away from long-term renters and pushing up prices," but the number of Americans planning to use Airbnb this summer has apparently already doubled since last year.
Well, it sure is pushing down prices for hotels. Which is probably why crony capitalists get all pushed out of shape about this. As for housing prices and the housing shortage, AirBnB isn't responsible for that, it's zoning laws, rent control, and the interference of the federal government in the mortgage markets. But, hey, leave it to the usual suspects (Warren, Feinstein) to first wreck people's lives and then blame "big evil corporations" for the mess they created.
That's what the Citizen's United decision was all about: the right of corporations to contribute to political campaigns.
That is incorrect. Citizens United was about the right of a non-profit organization to make a film critical of Hillary Clinton; it was a free speech case and decided as such by SCOTUS. SCOTUS reasoned that people didn't lose their free speech rights just because they got together voluntarily in order to exercise their right to free speech. That was absolutely the correct decision.
By the way, your post simultaneously says "corporations cannot contribute to political campaigns" and "corporations can contribute to political campaigns because of the first amendment rights of the owners." Which? Can they, or can't they?
Corporations can engage in free speech, even on political issues. What they can't do is give money to politicians or their campaign organizations, or contribute to advertising that promotes candidates or parties. Is that confusingly complex? You bet. It's silly, it's stupid, it serves no purpose. But the point is: we have those limits, unlike many other democracies. For example, Australia, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland have no contribution limits from either individuals or corporations and no spending limits either, and many of those countries are often held up as model democracies by the very people who argue for campaign financing limits in the US.
I apparently am. Your sources provide no insight as to what the hell you're trying to say,
You communicated that you believed that "corporations decide who we may vote for". The OpenSecrets site shows that money has been utterly and completely ineffective in determining the Republican nominee this year, consistent with long-standing results in political science that have failed to find a strong causal relationship between corporate donations and elections. Corporations do influence government policy, but that's through lobbying and access after elections, not by limiting your choice of candidates.
In different words, the two piss-poor candidates we have running for president this year are the result of political party machineries, think tanks, and the talking heads in the media; those groups, not corporations, have conspired, among other things, to limit who pollsters ask about and who participates in the presidential debates.
Nice thing about corporations; they have lawyers to find the loopholes.... Here's the top contributors list from OpenSecrets.org
The table you point to lists primarily contributions from employees, and they go primarily to causes and issues. The association with corporations is indirect, as is the association with parties. You're being dishonest by misrepresenting this table as "political donations by corporations".
Yes, that's the biggest loophole: the Political Action Committee ("PAC"). It's "supposed" to be to "communicate issues". Every candidate has one.
I don't see what "loophole" you see there. Are you saying that millions of people who want abortion rights, or gay rights, or marriage equality, or fight climate change should not be able to pool their money to buy airtime to make their views known?
A start would be a law mandating that money donated to political action committees has to be disclosed: if you're funding political campaigns, you have to do it openly, not secretly.
And that is effectively the law already; that's why we have OpenSecrets.org.
And what are such laws supposed to accomplish anyway? Have a look at the 2016 candidate Super PACs: http://tinyurl.com/j4kvjd9 The ten biggest spenders are Bush, Rubio, Clinton, Christie, anti-Trump, Cruz, Carson, Kasich, and Fiorina. The only one of those who even made it past the primary was Clinton, and her showing was piss-poor compared to what people expected. The idea that Super PAC money can buy elections is laughable in light of simple obvious facts (and political scientists have also found little evidence for this).
Furthermore, what do you expect to happen without PACs / Super PACs? Do you thing George Soros or Bill Gates are going to STFU? Of course not: they are going to buy airtime privately to peddle their (usually self-serving) political ideologies. Or they do what Bezos did and simply buy a newspaper. If you take away the ability of people to share resources in PACs and Super PACs, all you accomplish is that you increase the barrier to entry for public political statements and really limit it to a few plutocrats. Of course, that is why the Democrats are advocating this in the first place: to increase the state's control over political speech.
To the contrary, companies have plenty of political power. What we've discovered in the 20th century is that the money to run political campaigns is power.
Corporations in the US cannot "run political campaigns"; they can't even contribute to political campaigns.
Yes, that's the basis for the Supreme Court "Citizens United" decision. It is on questionable logical grounds however: corporations are not citizens, and while the people composing a corporation have first-amendment rights, it is not at all clear that the corporations themselves do.
That's like saying "radios are not citizens, and while the people using a radio have first-amendment rights, it is not at all clear that radios do".
The alternative would be to say that the people themselves have the right to donate to political campaigns, but if they want to do so, they must do so personally, and not from the corporations. This is also perfectly reasonable
Sure, it is "perfectly reasonable" if you want to reduce citizens to standing on soap boxes while governments, big media corporations, and incumbents get to tell people what to think.
Companies will have power as long as they can make political donations.
Companies in the US already have strong restrictions on "political donations".
What they can do is communicate on issues. So, are you going to start massively censoring speech by companies? How exactly is that going to work? Does "company" include the New York Times, or only companies you don't like?
Companies don't have "political power"; they can't vote, they can't serve in Congress. Companies simply inherit the right to free speech from their owners; that is, I can either speak for myself, or I can get together with a couple of other people--or a million other people--to pool money and exercise my free speech rights. If you attack that right of "companies", you're attacking my right to free speech. Furthermore, any even remotely plausible restrictions on free speech exercised through companies needs to make exceptions for media anyway, or are you going to abolish some of the biggest companies, namely media and TV companies? So you end up with government-licensed media.
You're also fundamentally wrong if you think that attacking free speech in such a way is going to reduce political corruption or rent seeking. If people can't use regular companies to exercise their right to free speech, the consequence will simply be that media companies with a license to speak freely will be snapped up by other companies and be used to spread their message. The net effect is simply to give the biggest companies even more power than they already have. Other groups that win are incumbent politicians and organizations with an already too cozy relationship with politicians.
So the Federation has secret police, but you can't name them
No, what I'm saying is that the existence of a secret police is not a necessary feature of an oppressive, unfree state, it is instead a symptom of something completely different, a failing state. (FWIW, one of the secret police forces in Star Trek is Section 31, there are probably others.)
Which is roughly 1/700th of the universe, and much better odds then any capitalist system.
We aren't talking about "odds" here, we are talking about the nature of Federation government, and it seems to be a standard, run-of-the-mill government run by humans, the kind that we have millennia of experience and centuries of political theory for. (Furthermore, I dispute the "better odds" claim; historically, almost all socialist governments have failed, and those that haven't are totalitarian.)
Capital goods are allocated by something we can't see off-screen which could very well be a market of some sort. Consumer goods are either obsolete (ie: cars) or provided by a replicator. Health is provided by some sort of socialized system which could be co-ops, Single Payer insurance, or an NHS clone. Education is totally laissez faire. Other then that there is no other then that because that economy works fine. With no economic problems, there's very little politics, and no reason for the government itself to do any of the things you're ascribing to it.
You are pretty much describing East Germany. The East German economy "worked fine" too, in that it provided housing, jobs, transportation, and health care to all citizens. It was also highly unfree, in that someone else told you where to live, what job to take, what housing you got, how much energy you could consume, and when you worked, based nominally on the state's assessment of your value to society and your ability to contribute. Its economy was performing poorly because, absent the usual market mechanisms, economic planners lacked the information to plan output or capital investments, workers and innovators lacked the information on what to work on. The numerous scarce resources (nice houses, rare art, desirable jobs, etc.) were awarded based on political connections and influence. To someone from a few centuries earlier, East Germany would have seemed a liberal, peaceful "post-scarcity" society, but compared to free market economies, it was an impoverished, oppressive shithole.
Look, we basically agree on the facts: humanity in Star Trek has eliminated money for personal transactions and gives everybody some kind of housing, education, health care, job, and resources for hobbies; particularly ambitious individuals--scientists, explorers, fighters--can join Starfleet and rise to power, fame, and (implicit) wealth within a military-style hierarchy. The difference between us is that you think that's a good outcome, whereas I recognize it for the oppressive and impoverished society that it is, because it really is little different from what the better socialist states were like in the 20th century.
Even the most diverse Silicon Valley tech firms are at 2 percent or under in terms of blacks in technology jobs, yet across the U.S. blacks earned 4.4 percent of master’s degrees in engineering and 3.6 percent of its Ph.D.s in 2014
You may find this hard to believe, but engineering degrees aren't all interchangeable, either in quality or in areas of expertise. Furthermore, many American born engineers don't want to move to Silicon Valley, and many engineers find it offensive when they are hired not for their skill and expertise, but to satisfy some diversity quota.
Alphabet's Google released data on diversity, saying it had more black, Latino and female employees but still lagged its goal of mirroring the population
What population would that be? The US population? The OPEC population? The world population? The population of US computer science graduates? The population of Google search engine users? The population of Android users? I'd like to know what these "diversity" goals for companies are supposed to be and why.
Slashdot Mirror
You're welcome to present data to the contrary. Until then, you are the idiot who presents his misinformed opinions as fact.
Really? If it always comes "2nd place", why have hotels at all? Why not convert all hotels into apartments? Who decides?
The problem with places like San Francisco is an imbalance between jobs, housing, and other demands on space. Since the decision on tradeoffs between these different demands are pretty much entirely made by government in San Francisco, that imbalance is clearly the fault of government, not of developers, AirBnB, property owners, or anybody else. So, given a decades long history of failed city planning that has created the current mess, the idea that limiting AirBnB rentals is going to address these problems is ludicrous.
"By my definition"? We are talking about societies that have abolished money and consumer markets. Have any of the European nations abolished money and consumer markets? No. So, that's not what we are talking about here. Even socialist East Germany, which I gave as an example, wasn't as extreme as Roddenberry's fiction.
Also, Western European economies are "social market economies" not "socialist"; they have money, private ownership of the means of production, and mostly free exchange of goods and services. Switzerland, Ireland, Estonia, and the UK have more economic freedom than the US.
I never said the Federation was terrible "because it has a secret police". It was you who started talking about a "secret police" not me.
That is my point: Roddenberry didn't show that because, like you, he didn't understand the consequences of the economic and social system he postulated. That is, Roddenbery's depiction of human society is absurd; humans and human societies don't function that way and never will.
Yes, indeed. And that's why I brought up East Germany: to a medieval peasant, it would have looked like the pinnacle of freedom and wealth, but compared to its contemporary democratic free market societies, it was a poverty stricken totalitarian shithole. When you look at humanity in Star Trek, you are like a medieval peasant looking at East Germany: you erroneously think those people must be wealthy and free.
Property owners charge more to short term renters than to long term renters because short term renting is riskier.
Short term housing and long term housing are indeed in competition for housing units; but based on what do you prefer one to the other? Why is it better to arbitrarily force property owners to allocate more resources to long term housing and fewer to short term housing?
In any case, the massive housing shortage and astronomical housing prices in places like San Francisco has nothing to do with AirBnB since it existed long before. The reason for that is much simpler: voters vote to create housing shortages because they see it in their own interest. It's highly dysfunctional, but voters in places like San Francisco only have themselves to blame.
Taxation and spending don't generate wealth. The only thing that generates wealth is actually producing something valuable.
Except... that's not going to happen. These are lots of well organized people with lots of lobbying power, and they aren't going to let you or anybody else take away their cushy jobs. Furthermore, we have all these people there precisely because voters and politicians have decided time and again that a simple cash benefit program isn't going to cut it.
Furthermore, cost of living varies widely across the country; how are you going to deal with that? I mean, a $10000 UBI is below the federal poverty line, and you can't possibly live on that in many metropolitan areas. Will UBI recipients have to pay full price for health insurance or are you still going to subsidize that?Are you going to give UBI to every adult, or even person, or what? Do people living together each get their own UBI? What possible criteria are you going to use to decide this?
Apart from the fact that your numbers don't add up and that it would wreck the economy, you have a more fundamental misunderstanding...
See, things don't work that way in the real world. People fleeing the East Bloc had to leave almost all their personal possessions; they still escaped to the West. Why? Because they correctly reasoned that they would be far better off starting from scratch in an economy that actually works and lets them accumulate wealth. Likewise, except for inept trust fund kids and the elderly, most working age rich people are going to reason that a political system that has gone off the rails in the way you propose is just going to continue to wreck their lives, and that they are going to be better off starting from scratch somewhere else than wait for you to take ever more of their hard earned money.
To put this differently, the fact that our politicians are corrupted by money is something we should address by punishing the politicians, not by taking away the right of law-abiding citizens and organizations to engage in free speech.
Furthermore, Hillary Clinton is an excellent example of the kind of corruption we are seeing in US politics today: she and her husband have translated public office into personal wealth and power, while attempting to use campaign laws to suppress opinions critical of Hillary. That kind of conduct by public officials is what we should punish, and punish severely.
Yes, you are repeating yourself, and your statement is as wrong as it was at the beginning: PACs aren't a "loophole"; what they can and cannot do is part of campaign finance law. Campaign finance has never been shown to corrupt the political process in the US.
There is too much money in politics, but it isn't in campaign finance. Where it actually exists is in the connections between public officials, corporations, lobbyists, and non-profits. Hillary Clinton is a prime example of that kind of corruption, selling herself to corporations and running a billion dollar foundation soliciting "donations" from the people she interacts with as a public servant. Those are the activities that we should make illegal.
No shit: individuals actually have a right to determine who lives in their own home.
For example, I wouldn't rent a room to a privileged arrogant white woman posing as a Native American, like, oh, Elizabeth Warren herself.
Well, it sure is pushing down prices for hotels. Which is probably why crony capitalists get all pushed out of shape about this. As for housing prices and the housing shortage, AirBnB isn't responsible for that, it's zoning laws, rent control, and the interference of the federal government in the mortgage markets. But, hey, leave it to the usual suspects (Warren, Feinstein) to first wreck people's lives and then blame "big evil corporations" for the mess they created.
That is incorrect. Citizens United was about the right of a non-profit organization to make a film critical of Hillary Clinton; it was a free speech case and decided as such by SCOTUS. SCOTUS reasoned that people didn't lose their free speech rights just because they got together voluntarily in order to exercise their right to free speech. That was absolutely the correct decision.
Corporations can engage in free speech, even on political issues. What they can't do is give money to politicians or their campaign organizations, or contribute to advertising that promotes candidates or parties. Is that confusingly complex? You bet. It's silly, it's stupid, it serves no purpose. But the point is: we have those limits, unlike many other democracies. For example, Australia, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland have no contribution limits from either individuals or corporations and no spending limits either, and many of those countries are often held up as model democracies by the very people who argue for campaign financing limits in the US.
You communicated that you believed that "corporations decide who we may vote for". The OpenSecrets site shows that money has been utterly and completely ineffective in determining the Republican nominee this year, consistent with long-standing results in political science that have failed to find a strong causal relationship between corporate donations and elections. Corporations do influence government policy, but that's through lobbying and access after elections, not by limiting your choice of candidates.
In different words, the two piss-poor candidates we have running for president this year are the result of political party machineries, think tanks, and the talking heads in the media; those groups, not corporations, have conspired, among other things, to limit who pollsters ask about and who participates in the presidential debates.
I have no trouble detecting your cynicism and sarcasm, as well as the incorrect assumptions your cynicism and sarcasm are rooted in.
Hence my comment: "Low information voters like you no doubt believe that, absurd as it actually is."
Are you really so stupid that you don't understand what I'm saying even with sources provided?
Low information voters like you no doubt believe that, absurd as it actually is.
I mean, have a look at the massive spending lavished on the favorites of the Republican establishment and their abject failure:
https://www.opensecrets.org/ou...
Even Clinton has turned out to be an exceptionally weak candidate despite her massive spending.
The table you point to lists primarily contributions from employees, and they go primarily to causes and issues. The association with corporations is indirect, as is the association with parties. You're being dishonest by misrepresenting this table as "political donations by corporations".
I don't see what "loophole" you see there. Are you saying that millions of people who want abortion rights, or gay rights, or marriage equality, or fight climate change should not be able to pool their money to buy airtime to make their views known?
And that is effectively the law already; that's why we have OpenSecrets.org.
And what are such laws supposed to accomplish anyway? Have a look at the 2016 candidate Super PACs: http://tinyurl.com/j4kvjd9 The ten biggest spenders are Bush, Rubio, Clinton, Christie, anti-Trump, Cruz, Carson, Kasich, and Fiorina. The only one of those who even made it past the primary was Clinton, and her showing was piss-poor compared to what people expected. The idea that Super PAC money can buy elections is laughable in light of simple obvious facts (and political scientists have also found little evidence for this).
Furthermore, what do you expect to happen without PACs / Super PACs? Do you thing George Soros or Bill Gates are going to STFU? Of course not: they are going to buy airtime privately to peddle their (usually self-serving) political ideologies. Or they do what Bezos did and simply buy a newspaper. If you take away the ability of people to share resources in PACs and Super PACs, all you accomplish is that you increase the barrier to entry for public political statements and really limit it to a few plutocrats. Of course, that is why the Democrats are advocating this in the first place: to increase the state's control over political speech.
Corporations in the US cannot "run political campaigns"; they can't even contribute to political campaigns.
That's like saying "radios are not citizens, and while the people using a radio have first-amendment rights, it is not at all clear that radios do".
Sure, it is "perfectly reasonable" if you want to reduce citizens to standing on soap boxes while governments, big media corporations, and incumbents get to tell people what to think.
Companies in the US already have strong restrictions on "political donations".
What they can do is communicate on issues. So, are you going to start massively censoring speech by companies? How exactly is that going to work? Does "company" include the New York Times, or only companies you don't like?
Companies don't have "political power"; they can't vote, they can't serve in Congress. Companies simply inherit the right to free speech from their owners; that is, I can either speak for myself, or I can get together with a couple of other people--or a million other people--to pool money and exercise my free speech rights. If you attack that right of "companies", you're attacking my right to free speech. Furthermore, any even remotely plausible restrictions on free speech exercised through companies needs to make exceptions for media anyway, or are you going to abolish some of the biggest companies, namely media and TV companies? So you end up with government-licensed media.
You're also fundamentally wrong if you think that attacking free speech in such a way is going to reduce political corruption or rent seeking. If people can't use regular companies to exercise their right to free speech, the consequence will simply be that media companies with a license to speak freely will be snapped up by other companies and be used to spread their message. The net effect is simply to give the biggest companies even more power than they already have. Other groups that win are incumbent politicians and organizations with an already too cozy relationship with politicians.
No, what I'm saying is that the existence of a secret police is not a necessary feature of an oppressive, unfree state, it is instead a symptom of something completely different, a failing state. (FWIW, one of the secret police forces in Star Trek is Section 31, there are probably others.)
We aren't talking about "odds" here, we are talking about the nature of Federation government, and it seems to be a standard, run-of-the-mill government run by humans, the kind that we have millennia of experience and centuries of political theory for. (Furthermore, I dispute the "better odds" claim; historically, almost all socialist governments have failed, and those that haven't are totalitarian.)
You are pretty much describing East Germany. The East German economy "worked fine" too, in that it provided housing, jobs, transportation, and health care to all citizens. It was also highly unfree, in that someone else told you where to live, what job to take, what housing you got, how much energy you could consume, and when you worked, based nominally on the state's assessment of your value to society and your ability to contribute. Its economy was performing poorly because, absent the usual market mechanisms, economic planners lacked the information to plan output or capital investments, workers and innovators lacked the information on what to work on. The numerous scarce resources (nice houses, rare art, desirable jobs, etc.) were awarded based on political connections and influence. To someone from a few centuries earlier, East Germany would have seemed a liberal, peaceful "post-scarcity" society, but compared to free market economies, it was an impoverished, oppressive shithole.
Look, we basically agree on the facts: humanity in Star Trek has eliminated money for personal transactions and gives everybody some kind of housing, education, health care, job, and resources for hobbies; particularly ambitious individuals--scientists, explorers, fighters--can join Starfleet and rise to power, fame, and (implicit) wealth within a military-style hierarchy. The difference between us is that you think that's a good outcome, whereas I recognize it for the oppressive and impoverished society that it is, because it really is little different from what the better socialist states were like in the 20th century.
Sounds like the goats are out for revenge.
You may find this hard to believe, but engineering degrees aren't all interchangeable, either in quality or in areas of expertise. Furthermore, many American born engineers don't want to move to Silicon Valley, and many engineers find it offensive when they are hired not for their skill and expertise, but to satisfy some diversity quota.
What population would that be? The US population? The OPEC population? The world population? The population of US computer science graduates? The population of Google search engine users? The population of Android users? I'd like to know what these "diversity" goals for companies are supposed to be and why.
True, Hillary goes for bigger fish.
Also, "regulating the shit out of companies" is one of the prime mechanisms for crony capitalism, so that's in character.
to the Crony Capitalist in Chief!
But fear not, Hillary will be completely different, having no connections to big banks or corporations AT ALL!