Capital and government aren&#x27;t enemies. Government is the thing that supports the relations that give capital power. However, government is in a balancing act between the working class and the capitalist class. Government is not in conflict with capital, government is the mediating body that balances the conflicts of capitalism.<p>Calling the Wobblies the lunatic fringe is accepting propaganda uncritically. The labor movement, and the IWW was a key institution of the labor movement, was radical, but not fringe and has been persistently defamed for decades.<p>&gt; Taxation is (ab)used, IMO, to promote normative ideas far too much. It should simply be a way to pay for government, nothing more, nothing less.<p>What is the role of government? Everything the government does is normative.<p>&gt; This is doable, with tools from economics but using norms to derive other norms is a good way to end up with entangled and bizarro systems. Just getting people to agree on Coase&#x27;s interpretation of externalities seems nearly impossible. We have partial technocracy, with ideological shims rather than stern empirical underpinnings.<p>You are being far too optimistic believing there could be a technocracy without ideology. That kind of thinking only can give you a blind spot for your own ideology. Technocracy these days usually means the kind promulgated by neoliberalism, but it has also been pushed as part of authoritarian command economies like the USSR. What exactly is a &quot;full&quot; technocracy supposed to be?<p>&gt; Just getting people to agree on Coase&#x27;s interpretation of externalities seems nearly impossible.<p>And irrelevant. Coase theorem only applies when transaction costs are minimal. They are not minimal in real life. They can&#x27;t be. Coase theorem theoretically nice and practically useless. Coase&#x27;s most substantial contribution to economic theory is how people organize in the presence of transaction costs, not how nice everything would be without them.