[colechristensen]

Communism or something like it can easily work post-scarcity.

You can't trust human nature to toil away in factories and hard jobs and do so efficiently for 1/2 of waking life.

Make that fraction a lot smaller... say the only people that needed to work on whatever were the ones that actually wanted to... and suddenly communism works. Open source software works and so much of it is done because people just want to do it. Some day automation and efficiency will get to a point where nerds who have interests will end up doing all of the work because it's what they want to do. Imagine a 3d printer capable of making complex metal/plastic/ceramic/electronic/whatever objects. You'd get hordes of people designing and sharing things just because they wanted to. Design a 3d-printer that can print copies of itself (as well as most of the things a person could want) and suddenly a huge chunk of capitalism is just unnecessary.

50 years after the creation of Star Trek, we should be able to at least imagine the Star Trek economy being technically feasible in the not too distant future.