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Originally Posted by wazz
I don't understand. Illegal not to work? Why are you including that stipulation?
To avoid an epic Tragedy of the Commons. Under actual socialism it would be like giving everyone a $3K/mo UBI. I.e., enough workers won't show up for work to make it untenable.
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Why are you including that stipulation? In terms of alternatives to capitalism, I'm not claiming that there's a reasonable system that gives us a decent standard of living without some exchange of money - I'm advocating for capitalism with guardrails, i.e. socialism, or communalism. When people on the left talk about the abolition of capitalism, what I take them to mean really is the abolition of the predatory capitalism that's based on an economics of permanent expansion, enclosing commons in a variety of forms as its fuel, with a more equal base of ownership, use value underlined over exchange value, safety nets, and so on. This is in the same sense of when those on the left say 'abolish the police', they don't actually mean the total and utter abolition of the police, with no replacement - unless they're anarchists, which to me doesn't make much sense as a position - rather, the total reform of the police system, with a huge diverting of funds and resources to social programs in order to prevent crime rather than treat it.
Fair enough but you still need to come up with some way to produce all the goods and services necessary to lift all those out of poverty because getting rid of all the corruption and whatnot won't do much to help the poor. Mostly it'll simply prevent the rich from getting richer, which again won't do much about helping the poor because this isn't a zero-sum game. And since we're talking about increasing living standards for the poor, it's really about redistributing consumption and there just aren't enough rich people consuming enough to make much of a difference for the tens of millions living at or near poverty.
So to really address the issue you'll need to go after upper-middle and lower-upper incomes because that's where the bulk of consumer spending comes from. For instance, compare the 20 million HHs with incomes in the $100K-$200K range and a total income of $3T... to the 60 million HHs with incomes < $30K with $1T in total income.