Right now there are state govts bending over backwards to provide cheap energy for data centers. The difference is being paid by people who live nearby through increased electricity costs. This is a tax with just extra steps

Are you sure this isn't being funded by our taxes? How many data centers are being built in areas where they have been given a huge tax break? How many banks are loaning money for AI infrastructure knowing that they'll be bailed out by taxpayers if they fail?

> as it isn't funded through taxes

This is simply not true, especially when you consider the massive amounts of government support so many parts of this "experiment with their own money" is getting. As a Utah resident its extremely evident in how forcefully they're pushing through what will be one of the largest datacenters in the world despite near universal disapproval from the citizens.

> We didn't. The USSR had 100% employment long ago[0], and all the poverty that goes with it.

I don't think USSR poverty rates surpassed those of Tsarist Russia that preceded them. To their credit, I think ideologic competition between capitalist and communist blocks was part of what allowed improvement of life conditions of workers in capitalist countries, after WWII. Fear of revolutions avoided one-percenters taking all productivity gains in the period. They had to share some to keep guillotines away. As soon as things went south in the USSR, from the 70s onwards, and capitalism took over the whole world, lacking any sort of viable extant competition, we reverted back to the old norm, the workers were denied their share of the productivity gains since then, and here are us now. A regime premised on free competition was undermined by lack of competition to itself.

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