Even for Silicon Valley, Andy Kessler is a sickeningly accomplished guy. Moving out to San Francisco in 1993, Kessler co-founded Velocity Capital where, between 1996 and 2001, he transformed $100 million into $1 billion. Not satisfied with being filthy rich, Kessler then went onto becoming famous - publishing four non-fiction books between 2003 ad 2006, including his highly entertaining short history of digital technology, the personal computer and the Internet: How We Got Here: A Silicon Valley and Wall Street Primer. And now Kessler has just come out with his first published fiction, an irreverent novel about artificial intelligence called Grumby which Michael Lewis called "deliciously naughty".

So who better to talk about productivity, technology and investment than Kessler, a guy who knows better than most how we got to where we are in Silicon Valley, Wall Street and Main Street. In coming into our Techcrunch studios, Andy Kessler not only proved that he existed, but also confirmed that he has a highly controversial take on technological innovation, smart investment, job destruction and how entrepreneurs really create of wealth.

I had dinner last month in San Francisco with a cultural rebel, a young Internet activist friend of mine with fashionably subversive views about media. We dined South of Market, and after we'd polished off a bottle of Burgundy, I could tell he wanted to shock me.

"You know, I'm against intellectual property. My generation is never going to pay for content again," he said, raising his empty wine glass and smiling at me. "Big media is bad media. Your world is finished."

Whereas in the '60s, the divisive generational issues were free love and marijuana and Vietnam, today the great culture war between the young (him) and the old (me) is the economic and cultural value of traditional intellectual content. Members of my analog generation remain comfortable paying for their newspapers, books, movies and music. But many of his digital generation, having grown up on the cornucopian commons of free online content and semi-legal piracy, have been unwilling to spend money subsidizing what they consider to be obsolete large media companies.

"So how should journalists or creative artists be paid?" I asked.

And that, of course, is the crux of the problem. If hardly anyone younger than 50 has been paying for content on the Internet, and online advertising is failing to subsidize content (even YouTube is still struggling to make money), how does any media company - big or small, good or evil - survive?

But here is where he really surprised me. Rather than dance around my question, he actually had an answer, a solution that really shocked me and would, no doubt, shock most Americans with faith in the efficacy of the free market.

"The government is the solution," he said. "Media must be nationalized. We need the government to invest in high-quality journalism and in online culture."

Unfortunately, the young activist isn't alone in turning to Washington, D.C., to subsidize free media. More and more Internet radicals now see a government takeover as the solution to the economic crisis of traditional media. Take, for example, Free Press, a Washington group that promotes network neutrality and recently has come out in favor of large-scale government subsidization of online journalism. Indeed, at the Personal Democracy Forum conference in New York City two weeks ago, I debated Josh Silver, president of Free Press, who called for an enormous government investment in a BBC-style American public broadcasting company.

According to Daniel Pink, the author of the New York Times best-selling Drive, the great shift of the early 21st century is from left to right. Rather than a political change, however, Pink's shift is all about the brain. The 21st century, he argues, represents the triumph of our creative right brain skills over the more procedural thinking of our left brain.

"I dearly hope that politics won't have to fix the Internet. But the online world is too precious to the 21st century to become purely a festering source of perpetual subversion for the discontented. If we can balance the demand for individual rights with the need for personal responsibility -- in everything from intellectual property theft to the vitriol of anonymous online posting to an intuitive disrespect for other people's opinions and beliefs -- then the Internet can become a politically positive force in our nascent digital century.But this won't happen if we turn the Internet into a religion and regard its technology as eschatology. Rather than being about peddling conspiracy theories or swapping stolen songs or posting videos of your skateboarding cat on YouTube, citizenship is about recognizing the moral consequences of one's own actions. That's how the Internet can fix politics. That's how it can be a force for the public good."

It depends, of course, what you mean by democracy. Jimmy [Wales]'s definition of democracy was an anti-federalist position, a sort of an idealized, direct-democracy rhetoric which suggests (and I'm quoting him now) that "It's all about the people deciding." But of course at the foundation this country is a representative democracy, not a direct democracy, in which the federalists won over the anti-federalists.

The premise of democracy is not about the people deciding; it's about finding educated, high-quality political figures who will make wise decisions about the community. So I think Jimmy is falling into the old trap of appropriating democracy for his own ends.

One of the mistakes we make about the Internet is that it's technology. It isn't; it's ideology. The Internet was built by people who questioned authority. The Internet is bound up in a fundamental assault on the notion of expertise, on what Jimmy calls 'the mainstream media,' which includes shows like this, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal. And the idea that representative democracy, experts -- whether in media, in politics, in the arts, in legal affairs, in intellectual affairs -- are unreliable and need to be replaced by what Jimmy calls 'the people' is deeply dangerous.

What I most fear about the Internet -- which...we all use; I'm as addicted as everybody else -- is the way we take this technology, which has no center, is flattened, has done away with authority and expertise -- we take this technology to prove the ideological, idealized theories of Jimmy Wales. The truth is, we need expertise, we need authority, we need to remind ourselves of the foundations of representative democracy."

"The new National Broadband Plan just rolled out by the Federal Communications Commission paints a stunning picture of future opportunities to be delivered by broadband. From education to health care, for environmental sustainability and smarter consumption of energy, and for the opportunity for creative artists to reach audiences around the world, the plan lays out a future of breathtaking possibility.

Faster connections to every American home? I'm all for it. What could be more exciting to songwriters in Nashville than the idea of 100-megabit networks piping music directly into every home in America?

A recent study by the Country Music Association revealed that fully half of country music fans live in areas without broadband access. We applaud the effort to get faster connections for digital music to our fans. Except there's a gaping hole in the FCC plan. I can't find any meaningful ideas for shutting down the digital theft of music and other artistic content that has become a routine and damaging part of life in the Internet age."

"Innovation doesn't lead to justice and fairness. I'd argue there is a more dramatic inequality now then there ever was during the industrial revolution. We have fetishized change, but we are unfettered. If anything, the new media is less transparent and less accountable...I don't have a problem with Twitter or new media, my problem is that digital utopians have dressed up their ideology to sound like democracy...Google has become the master of seeming like an altruistic and public company and yet laughing all the way to the bank."