I am not sure if your (and sibling) comment is meant as a polemic, but let me add some context. Of course, communists did exactly that - there was enforced full

I am not sure if your (and sibling) comment is meant as a polemic, but let me add some context. Of course, communists did exactly that - there was enforced full employment so if you didn't get a job where you lived, you had to find it in the region where it was needed. There were incentives too, often the mining and heavy industry regions were actually the wealthiest in the country. For example, just after the WW2, my grandfather got a chemical engineering job at a petroleum plant in the north of Czechia (the plant was built by Germans to make fuel from the brown coal), and the job came with a nice new rowhouse (which he was able to, after cca 20 years, buy from the government as a private property). My point is this. Of course, for mining and heavy industry, it makes sense to build factories in a given place, and move people to them, everybody does that. But the Czechia underwent deindustrialization in the 90s, and the moving was touted by economists for the so-called "service economy" (which we were supposedly moving to after liberalization). So I am talking about the idea that people have to move on the whims of the financial capital, the modern ruling class. That's insane, and you still see it, for example, everybody is investing in Sillicon Valley, despite high living costs for the working class there. There are also negative examples, where factories (supposedly hard to move) get suddenly moved because of the tax or other incentives, which don't favor the investors. The difference is, investors (people who make decisions where to put capital) try to externalize the negligible cost (if any, sometimes it's simply a herd behavior) of investing at different places onto society, where it becomes a pointless but large cost of moving labor around. But a sane society, in my opinion, should rather let people live where they live and let the capital chase them (which is, with the exception of heavy industry, and possibly some intelectual endeavours, Akademgorodok comes to mind, what communists did). It is a choice every society can make. And as I mention earlier, the sanity check is, if you truly move people around only as much as is necessary from the production point of view, then the wealth should appear in the regions based on industries which are not easy to move (because of the additional incentive for the workers to move).