I’ve always liked the idea of airships, and we see these kinds of ventures pop up every few years. For whatever reason they don’t seem to take off unfortunately.
I imagine one roadblock is that all the existing infrastructure is geared towards planes. Airships have a different profile and need different kinds of maintenance so you can’t just land them at a regular airport.
As a side note, with new materials like graphene it might be possible to make vacuum lifters with very thin skins around a rigid frame at some point. These would have the best possible lift ratio.
This is not possible when capitalists are in charge of the society and have a government that represents their interests. And if you had the working class in charge then you wouldn’t need taxes in the first place because means of production would be owned by the workers and directed towards producing things that everyone needs. The whole point of taxes is to provide things like social services, educations, healthcare, and infrastructure. In a socialist society, that’s what labour is directed towards as the default.
A lot of the socialist policies in Europe are also an indirect result of USSR having existed. An example of an alternative system run by the workers meant that concessions had to be made in order to prevent local uprisings. This was a great read on the subject.
For sure, as soon as I see IoT or smart devices I immediately get suspicious nowadays.