> Suppose the initial investor is the government, and the sorts of businesses are only the types that are good for the country: health, education, and energy.<p>This might work in theory, but in practice, the money always goes to politicians' friends, allies, and funding sources. Consider all the bridges to nowhere built. Or my favorite example - building troop transports that the Joint Chief of Staff says the Army doesn't need or want any more of. One billion per transport, but we aren't likely to be needing a larger scale Normandy-style invasion transport any more, so they go unused and take up space and require maintenance. But they're built in some influential politicians' district, so each year they keep building and shipping one of these billion dollar paperweights that the Army doesn't want.<p>In fact, I'll go a step further - there's a decent chance that some of these programs will actually be destructive by chasing out legitimate businesses that can't compete with government subsidized preferentially treated nonsense.<p>In theory, we could stipulate that "the government will only fund good, non-corrupt stuff." This, however, has pretty much never worked in practice anywhere, especially not in a representative democracy where politicians take legal bribes (we call it "campaign finance") and then the politicians give business and money back to the people who campaign financed them. I mean, what do you call a politician taking money, using it for his own gain, and then giving public money back to the person who gave him money? That's almost exactly the definition of corruption to me, but it's institutionalized in America as campaign finance. So no, I have no faith that the politicians would allocate funding to "only the types that are good for the country." At least, they're not doing it right now with the billions and trillions they're spreading around, and I don't see any reason to think additional funds would be spent more judiciously.