Comment by vostrocity

You mentioned communism, and I'll add to that since I've lived under communism. It's a great idea in theory that doesn't work in practice because of human limitations.

It doesn't work, because A) the reason you said: government officials favor themselves, and B) the knowledge problem: the economy is far too complex for a small group of officials to plan what everyone else should be doing.

An interesting idea that emerges now is an AI-moderated socialism. If A) AI can be trusted to not favor itself, and B) AI has perfect knowledge of each human (our needs, what we're good at, etc.), I can imagine an AI-moderated socialism to work.

An ideal future I can imagine is a world with many AI-moderated polities, and humans have freedom to move between them. AI-moderated polities share some global standards on safety, trade, and conflict resolution but otherwise have differing policies so humans have the freedom to find the one that they most prefer.