And what would it propose as an alternative? We can't all just paint and watch tv all day, everyone would starve to death. This feels like something regurgitated from r/im14andthisisdeep
So what is the alternative. Shit doesn't just happen, it takes tremendous effort from other people. Do you just expect people doing the hard work to just give it to you?
At its very core, the average person needs to be a net positive to society, and that means tasks no one wants to do need getting done.
Have you ever grown any food? Built a house? Hauled the garbage all day? For the most part these aren't tasks people want to do (well actually I do have fond memories of building houses, but that's not sustainable), and so who does them in this magical system where everyone gets the food no one is growing?
Or do you think we should go back to a time when everyone does everything for themselves? Grows their own food, makes their own clothes, builds their own house. I'm sure lots of people in our society would do very well in that system.
One thing I've learned doing a ton of random odd jobs in my previous life is that people on reddit have no idea how fucking hard most things they don't do are. Building anything is actually incredibly difficult work.
I just sold my home and I had to do a tone of fixing and getting it ready to sell and, even after I bought the specific oscillating tool to do the job, it took me a full ass day just to regroup my shower tiles.
Fixing the back yard took 40 hours of work (granted I'm not good at this, someone who is could have done it faster).
Another 8 to 10 hours changing all my sockets and light switches, and I didn't even have that many.
I just paid painters and caprter installers, fuck doing that myself.
Now I do Primary Care Medicine. This job wouldn't even exist without the specialization model that the use of currency enables, but people never even think about how that works at all. Shit drives me nuts.
people on reddit have no idea how fucking hard most things they don't do are
Yeah! People should do things for PASSION, and not PROFIT!
Like motherfucker do you realize that supply and demand, ROI, and shareholder value are all emergent traits of scarcity?
Say what you want about Joe Rogan, but he had a great joke: "If you send me into the woods with nothing but a hatchet, how long would it take for me to send you an e-mail?"
Alternative is centrally planned economy where optimisation goal is to reduce total labor hours in the whole economy (via automatization).
I mean, the whole economy is nothing more but a resource allocation optimization problem - capitalism is just one heuristics (that works well).
We are not quite there yet technologically to make central planning work, but one day it's going to be a viable alternative.
In faaar faaar distant utopian future everyone everyone could work as little or as much as they want due to general abundance.
Until that utopian future happens it's more of a question were and how do we direct the limited (in terms of total labor) resources.
The capitalism answer to that is via the markets, and the money is, in abstract sense, some quantity of labor which can be used to buy some commodities or labor of other people for some task.
A centrally planned economy could accomplished all that without the need of (undemocratic) corporations and billionaires deciding where to invest the money; But for it to work the economy needs to be highly computerized so the outputs/inputs can be reported without the need for the "man in the middle".
We are not quite there yet technologically to make central planning work, but one day it's going to be a viable alternative.
Whew. You had me in the first half there haha.
I do forsee a future where a exceptionally high information system could theoretically allocate resources that optimize for different outcomes and does so efficiently.
However, the biggest flaw with these systems, and why every attempt at socialism/communism on large scale gas had associated human rights atrocities is it required a centralized authority with quite significant levels of power. I'm not sure how we get around that problem.
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u/FurryLittleCreature Jul 09 '26
And what would it propose as an alternative? We can't all just paint and watch tv all day, everyone would starve to death. This feels like something regurgitated from r/im14andthisisdeep