alt Hacker NewsThere's an intuitive appeal in having a coordination mechanism where good leaders decide which problems are important to work on and then get the smart people to work on those problems. But historically, societies structured that way haven't worked well; they struggle to get good signals on whether the solutions make sense, and the coordination mechanisms are vulnerable to subversion by bad leaders. The Soviet Union famously forbade anyone from researching genetics for decades because a crank named Trofim Lysenko who didn't think it was real happened to become politically popular.
There is probably a middle ground somewhere between literal Soviet communism and unregulated capitalism. There are quite a lot of countries happily functioning in that middle ground, and while they're not making 15 people incredibly wealthy they're also not grinding the rest of the population into the ground.