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by imron 3079 days ago
> Capitalism, as a system, is awful at allocating this work that people love to the people who love it.

It's significantly better at it than the alternatives.

Even UBI. Sure UBI sounds great in principle, you'll be given enough to live on and you can spend your time doing whatever takes your fancy, but in large-scale practice I don't see it working.

Making the majority of the population dependent on the government for their income is not something that has historically worked well.

1 comments

One, they're not dependent on the government. Only on a society organized to redistribute wealth so as to prevent scarcity, in the broadest sense of the term. Could be anarchic or contributory in a different social climate.

Two, the idea is not that people will goof off all day. Some yeah. Most, no. Most people will find work they like doing and do it. What does go away, however, is the fear of failure, unemployment and poverty. So they will have much better options to search for their most effective niche, rather than leaping in panic upon the first offer.

One, there is no practical way to roll this out across an entire society without government involvement. Businesses and wealthy benefactors can make it work for small trials, but large scale society level in a western democracy? It will need government involvement, and even if you try to do it without them, they will stick their nose in it anyway whether you like it or not.

Two, ideas and reality are very different things. The idea of communism is that everyone is provided for and people give what they can and only take what they need. Sounds great, very altruistic. In reality, it's been a nightmare everywhere it has ever been implemented at a societal level because the idea fails to take in to account human nature. UBI proponents overlook or understate this factor too.