This gives me an idea:
"Social assistance" is designed to prevent the wealth distribution from peaking at zero income, as predicted by a simple Statistical Economics model. Similarly, "Tax the rich!" is designed to compensate for the ability of those with the financial resources to tilt the playing field dramatically in their favor (which is manifested as the tail of the wealth distribution stretching out far beyond the exponential Boltzmann distribution's predictions). Neither one is working very well. The amount of money spent by government on the bureaucracy required to deliver the former only to those who "deserve" it and wrest billions away from the fat cats' lawyers is surely far greater than the cost of a Universal Basic Income. But most people hate the idea of "just giving away money to lazy bums". So we're at a stalemate.
Meanwhile, we are obsessed with "growth", even when it requires consumers to buy more and more junk they don't need, that puts them deeper and deeper in debt and despair, and that doesn't make them happier in any real way.
I'd love to see a reversal of our civilization's obsession with growth, but it doesn't seem very likely. Is there anything government could possibly do to change things without incurring the wrath of the voters? Here's my idea: go after Madison Avenue!
A Bureau of Truth in Advertising (BTA) is charged with vetting every advertisement to ensure that (a) the product or service actually does what it claims; (b) it would actually be beneficial to the target audience; (c) it does not harm society or the environment. In the USA, the BTA would subsume the FDA, the EPA, the Department of Commerce, all the various Better Business Bureaus and probably a host of other sub-bureaucracies that already have the expertise to judge the (a) (b) (c)'s of an ad.
Think of it as counter-espionage. Madison Avenue and its tentacles are in the business of spreading propaganda and disinformation for the most insidious of all domestic terrorists: greedy and unprincipled corporations! Unlike social media, they cannot claim protection under Freedom of Speech, because their purpose is explicitly to deceive and subvert, not to express an honest opinion.
The inevitable war with MadMen would then at least expose their true intentions toward the rest of us.
