Again, you're just using pejorative circular logic. It's not "naive", nor would it be a "shitshow". It doesn't yield an ideal system, because this isn't a place where you're going to get some sort of healthy stalemate. It's not going to work if capitalists can just buy influence, which is inevitable. No amount of regulation will stop that. Less money inherently means less freedom. The more inequality a system allows for, the more it marginalizes the poor. Competition based capitalistic markets certainly don't benefit the poor as much as a socialist state would. Someone born into a society, ignorant of their socioeconomic standing, would always prefer a more socialist state. Therefore a socialist state is better.
It's fallacious to think that something is good just because it's a middle ground, or that something is just bad because it's an arbitrary distance from an arbitrarily defined center. It's a bad method of figuring out the best result. It's not like we're talking about throwing out all competing interest groups anyway.
I'm not using reductive logic to figure this out: I'm looking to historic and current governance implementations. You are using reductive logic. You are discounting the need for markets to efficiently allocate resources for their best use. Doling out everything in rationed portions does not work. There is no AI driven society, now or in the future, that this will work in or be facilitated by.
The idea is to make things more even, more egalitarian...not strictly egalitarian. Incompetent, unskilled people make terrible choices on how to allocate resources and effort (just look at Venezuela!). Some sort of integrated meritocracy is inevitable for this reason, even if it is impossible to implement fully justly. This is also the reason that China moved in this direction economically.
The way you compensate for this is with redistribution of wealth and resources via social programs and investment in public works after they've been earned in a competitive market. It is incredibly short-sighted to think monetary incentives don't drive innovation at all. They absolutely do...just not to the extent or scale implemented in a place like US at the moment.
By having the taxes of the rich pay for the schooling, healthcare, etc. of the poor, you provide the poor with a more equal playing field to elevate their socioeconomic status by. This is why Scandinavian countries have the best social mobility in the world, far surpassing other industrialized countries like the US.
Also, my position is not centrist. Again, within the context of the global political spectrum, I am advocating for a center left stance. Social democrats occupy this territory. There is no real social democratic representation in America at the party level. The Democrats in the US are center to center-right and the Republicans center-right to right-right.
