ckaihatsu wrote:
What's my 'idiotic fantasy', exactly -- ?
Good question.
The Modern World is a cooperative effort, although it often doesn't look that way. You want to force a bottom up perspective on it, but the history is quite different.
In the first century of an economy that goes capitalist, there are a lot of things that can go wrong. Our Civil War makes for a dandy example.
To be successful, you need to have the players at the table. That means government and business needs to cooperate with workers and knowledge institutions.
"The federal government in 1935 guaranteed unions the right to organize and bargain collectively, and the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 established a mechanism for putting a floor under wages and a ceiling on hours that continues to this day. It provided, in 1935, financial aid to the aged, infirm, and unemployed when they could no longer provide for themselves. Beginning in 1933, it helped rural and agricultural America with price supports and development programs when these sectors could barely survive. Finally, by embracing an activist fiscal policy after 1937, the government assumed responsibility for smoothing out the rough spots in the American economy."
https://millercenter.org/president/fdroosevelt/impact-and-legacyThey didn't even mention the Wagner Act.
"On this day in 1935, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed into law the National Labor Relations Act, which established guidelines for ties between business and labor, including collective bargaining rights for labor unions. It guarantees basic rights of private-sector employees to organize into trade unions, to engage in collective bargaining for better terms and conditions at work, and to take collective action, including going out on strike if warranted.
The legislation is also known as the Wagner Act, after Sen. Robert F. Wagner (D-N.Y.), a principal architect of the measure. In the decade after its passage, opponents of the Wagner Act introduced several hundred bills to amend or repeal the law. All of them failed or were vetoed by Roosevelt until the passage of the Taft–Hartley Act in 1947 by a Republican-controlled Congress."
https://www.politico.com/story/2018/07/05/fdr-signs-national-labor-relations-act-july-5-1935-693625You can nitpick all you want, but safeguarding collective bargaining and making laws that protected workers was a huge improvement.
If you haven't read the history you can't know the massive opposition FDR faced.