Hell yeah! I didn’t even know I would be getting paid until I went down to the station to ask how I sign up.

Yeah, some of that would be amazing!

I’d also happily shovel shit at the local zoo or assist nurses with prepping beds, etc (probably just ending up getting in their way, however!)

So did I, but I’m more referring to the Wall Street and CEO as well Billionaire types who wouldn’t do anything if they didn’t get more out of it.

I mean, the earliest known currency is almost exactly as old as the earliest known cities. Farmers would deposit a large amount of grain at the local temple (which were effectively the tax collection sites of the time) and were given clay tokens on exchange, which could be used in place of actual goods at tax time.

This system was set up because of the nature of farming: you make a lot of product in a short time, but most of the year you’re just waiting for your crop to grow. These tokens allowed farmers to pay their tax duties up front, and then have physical proof that they’d done so when paying taxes outside of harvest season. But it was only a matter of time before people started trading those tokens amongst each other. “Give me a goat and I’ll give you these tokens so you don’t have to pay tribute next season.”

Before that, villages were pretty much just hand-to mouth communities of just a few families. Surviving, sure, but not in the kind of complex society where one needs to draw equivalence between extremely different forms of labor.

Well for the majority of time when we did not use money, communities were quite small and/or ressources were so scarce that money lost it’s value, as people lose trust that you can actually exchange it for goods later on (e.g. during a famine the incremental value of food in monetary terms is astronomical). Money hence emerged first in situations where value needed to be conveyed over large distances, where punitive mechanisms of governance (i.e. someone more powerful than you puts you in a box or lobs off your hands) become ineffective - it emerged along the first trade routes, and means of control by distant power centers (such as in China).

There are alternative systems for the distribution of scarce resources, but they ultimately require centralized governance bodies - this is where most communist states failed in practice. If something belongs to ‘everyone’, it belongs to the one with the biggest stick, usually the state; If something should be used for the common good, someone qualitatively needs to decide what that is.

I can’t think of any alternative forms of resource distribution that don’t rely on a central decision making party.

The key issue with money, and why it leads to the emergency of fascist ideology imo, is when money pools with a powerful class of people that or filthy rich, somehow ‘own’ entire organisations including the media, and then become politicians as well. Concentration of power is the actual evil here, not private ownership.

So what should we change?

• Wealth tax and high inheritance tax tied directly to monetary redistribution mechanisms such as a basic income
• 100% income tax above a certain level of income but lower or no takes on most income
• Taxing of inhuman productivity (if elegantly possible)
• No owning of land, just renting it from the state.
• Price-based mechanisms to account for negative externalities such as greenhouse gasses
• Limits to allowed pay disparities in companies
• Company types that disincentive value extraction and financialization
• Limits to stock buybacks
• Limits to the complexity of financial products
• Hard upper limit of how much you can own lol
• etc.

Long story short, what Social Market Economy was originally intended to do

I think UBI would give us a lot more artists.

Yeah for sure, it took me a couple decades but i finally got a data job, where i really just enjoy the work, after starting from the bottom minimum wage and working up a bit in two other careers first lol

Finally im somewhere where if i get laid off inwould literally just happily work on a data analysis portfolio while applying to jobs. My two prior careers (law and education) I left them because i just hated the day to day work.

This altruistic instinct rapidly tapers beyond one’s immediate community. Sure, we have the instinct to try helping others, even those who are very distant. But without reinforcement of our good behaviors, any given behavior will peter out.

Like, suppose you are making enough money to live comfortably. You then hear about a charity that builds wells to provide clean drinking water to people in impoverished parts of the world, and decide you can spare $5 per month to help them. So you donate $5. However, this charity focuses entirely on doing the actual charitable work, so you have to remember to donate and manually type in your credit card information each month. And they don’t do any PR. No monthly emails with personal stories about the people they helped or anything like that. Instead, they simply have a publicly accessible spreadsheet that has data on wells built and people served. Almost everyone would stop donating to this charity after a month or two, simply because they would forget or procrastinate until they forget, because our brains don’t assign relevance to things which don’t create an emotional impression on us. Compare this with, say, helping your child and their new partner build a home with your own hands. This kind of project provides lots of positive reinforcement - exercise, time outside, time spent with others, seeing progress being made day by day, the appreciation of others, the knowledge that you have helped someone who is important to you.

Hence why most people find most jobs to be unpleasant in one way or another. Not many people want to spend their days pumping a stranger’s septic system. The unpleasant work (aka, “work”) is what is left over after everyone does the pleasant work for free.

Also, some anthropologists theorize that the beginning of labor intensive agriculture and large permanent settlements was only possible via forced labor, coerced by violent, authoritarian leaders. Evidence shows that early agrarian life was significantly worse in just about every way than nomadic hunter-gatherer life, which explains why hunter-gatherer tribes almost universally fought against or fled from agrarian settlements.

We already have better farming technology. People prefer to grow gardens in their back yard with compost made from their coffee grounds instead. Iirc, John Green calculated that - even excluding the cost of his own labor - one tomato that he grew in his garden cost him $18.

There are certainly a lot of problems with modern agriculture. But food is far cheaper than it has been for pretty much all of human history, when the collection and preparation of food took up the vast majority of most people’s time.