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by nilaykumar
1158 days ago
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My need for homeostasis is independent of the economic system in which I live, certainly. But that does not refute GP's point that it's difficult "to create legal organizations that help people without the assumption of a profit motive" in our society. For example: if my basic necessities were covered by something like a UBI, I could spend my time teaching math/art/code/whatever. If I were a medieval peasant, to take another example, I'd be subsisting on my own farm and after the harvest (and after paying the lord a hefty amount of it) I might have some time to help neighboring villagers repair their tools. That is to say: the need for survival does not necessarily imply the need to have a society organized around profit-seeking. That we _do_ live in such a society today is a matter of history, not logic. The structuring of human society around profit-seeking (or capitalism more generally) is a relatively recent historical phase (what, about 600 years, maybe?) -- it was not inevitable and there's no logical reason to assume that it will go on forever. |
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Sure, but you'd still probably need to somehow gather additional resources to make that tool repair collective effective. You'd probably want to somehow acquire additional tools, maybe build a place to store spare parts, acquire spare parts and inventory them, etc.
Organizations today don't need to be profit seeking. I'm a member of many such groups which don't seek profit. We still ask for donations and/or have dues for members, not because we pay leadership any salaries but because some part of the mission does require acquiring things. If we didn't bring things in, we wouldn't be as successful at doing the mission.
You're ignoring a massive part of the tax code if you think all organizations in the US need a profit motive. But in the end almost all organizations probably need to acquire some stuff somehow, otherwise they'll probably fail.