That Soviet Jewish immigrants Sergey Brin wouldn't have developed Google and Max Levchin without DARPA and government-funded GPS is obvious. But the equally obvious correlation between immigration and entrepreneurship, with 40% of Silicon Valley successful startups founded by immigrants, shows that outlier levels of talent, ambition, toughness and outsider status also fuel success.
Here's an apolitical technocratic way to stop the plutocracy game: index a wealth tax to the Gini coefficient. Gini goes down and the rich get a tax cut. Gini goes up and the wealth tax rises. It destroys the incentive for wage suppression.
If you want to see a regime of plutocrats dependent on state intervention go to Italy, Spain, Portugal and Greece. By comparison the US is a genuine meritocracy. I doubt you've researched how the Forbes 400 made their money to arrive at the conclusion of your first statement.
My experience in investing with gifted startup founders tells me that talent combined with high level emotional intelligence that knows how to listen to lead a team through the startup valley of death is essential to building a company. Those lacking either one fail consistently. So your statement "but a small one at that" is empirically wrong. That a biotech startup founder benefited from government-funded research doesn't mean he wasn't a gifted and talent entrepreneur without whom his company would have failed. Absent this skill set in a highly competitive winners take most market, no government intervention will help a company survive.
It's true that the US is a socialistic country in which the wrong people are getting the benefits of government welfare: https://medium.com/age-of-awareness/youre-not-a-capitalist-until-84870880fbf0
Obama was right when he said "you didn't build that business (just by) yourself." DARPA, GPS, the NIH, the FDA built big tech and big pharma while the government collects no royalties for seed funding innovation. Marina Mazzucato's The Entrepreneurial State describes this process very well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Entrepreneurial_State
Again, we'll always have a large dose of socialism. It's just a matter of who gets the socialism and who has to live in cutthroat capitalism.
