SuiNeko wrote:
You're kind of jumping to a particular answer there, which I don't think anyone is advocating. The choices aren't capitalism, communism, or nothing.
Well then, putting labels aside (communism etc...), we can go back to the original question, but we still have the same problem:
Quote:
Why do people care so much about working? There's plenty of food to distribute, plenty of energy to go around.
Where does that food come from? Why is there "plenty" to distribute? Even assuming this is the case, most of that food is coming from large operations, fueled by machinery, petroleum, etc... These farms cost resources to operate. Assuming everyone's job goes away, where do you get the ability to run a large farm like that? Who does your planting? Who builds the infrastructure to hold your livestock? How do you transport the food? How do you regulate quality, stop disease spread, prepare for the marketplace etc... All these things don't magically happen, they occur because people work. Individual people still have to do specific tasks in order to make the larger system operate. Even if you go back to the idea of a small community exchanging goods and services without currency, currency is just an extension of the barter system anyway. It's a way to set a standard to exchange those goods and services.
Let's say you throw out the idea of a society that exchanges goods and services, and everyone goes back to subsistence farming. How many people own enough land that they could even grow or raise sufficient food to feed themselves? If you lost your job today, would you be able to feed yourself and your family on of your own labor? Do you have the knowhow, the physical fortitude, and the dedication it would take to start a farm? Do you think that you can do it by sitting around partying and throwing rocks at trees? Or do you want to go a step further back to the hunter/gatherer days? Do you think a half hour a day of foraging is enough to sustain you? Either way, if you run into a dry spell, or a locust swarm, you and your family perish without neighbors/society to fall back on. The reason we're where we are at today, large interdependent society, is that it works like a group insurance policy. Small localized failures are absorbed into the larger matrix.
Yes, there will always be the small percentage of society that have the charisma to work their way up to a position where the rest of society can completely support them (without having to work). However history teaches us that once the rest of society catches on to that idea, revolutions occur - that's generally not a stable system, especially on a small scale.
And yes, I know I'm feeding the troll here and I generally try not to respond to Lex, but SuiNeko's post drew me in to the discussion.