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All of those hypotheticals can be true, yet you'll still need to deal with people who consciously choose not to work or do much less work. Under Socialism these behaviors are encouraged because they are rewarded regardless. Under Capitalism these people pay the price themselves, whether that is fair or not, not only is it more unfair to have others pay for it, but at least it discourages people to a great extent. > 1) Some folks will just do extra work and not be bothered that they are doing more I doubt this for most people. This is basically saying that right now a lot of people are ok with a pay cut (same work, less pay = free extra work). I can see a lot of people doing #2, which is equivalent to not working. And as mentioned before, these people are not working yet still somehow rewarded for it. #5 and #6 are true, and is why if everyone gets a living wage regardless of whether they work or not, the people who currently don't enjoy doing what they do would simply stop doing it. Maybe everyone would become some kind of artist, while machines keep the economy running, but that is a utopia that requires many technological breakthroughs, i.e. advanced AI, unlimited renewable energy, better batteries, etc... and we're not getting there without Capitalism, which is somewhat ironic. > but we'd also probably need to decide on some mechanism for "who performs sanitation if we do not get enough volunteers?" Today that mechanism is "you gotta eat, so you gotta work wage labor", but we could absolutely replace that with "least popular labor gets bonus luxuries" or "we all take turns, once a year you gotta collect trash". This is something that the market solves as if it where a large, decentralized computer. Without market incentives there needs to be top-down coordination to incentivize people and this becomes unmanageable and does not scale. I still feel that there is a problem with markets in how success is exponential for an extreme minority, while seemingly impossible to attain for a large portion at the bottom. I'm not sure what the best approach to solve that is, but we cannot take the wealth markets produce and expect the same output for a system without markets. The wealth we have under markets is not attainable without it, even though some people exponentially get rich from it. While inequality between rich and poor is bad, having everyone be poor because nobody can coordinate their productivity is even worse. Personally, I feel once AI becomes powerful enough, we will be able to do this kinds of complicated coordination that may solve the problem, however that path is a minefield of potential dystopias. |