this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2025
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While I don't disagree with this sentiment, it can be taken too far:
So within the necessities to stay alive and aligned with the means and needs of the society I can agree. Where this all falls apart is that inevitably some tribunal will decide this and inevitably someone will take control of said tribunal to funnel the best food/health care/education/jobs to their cronies, as anyone who lives in a former Soviet state like myself can attest to.
He was asked what he'd do if the grocery store thing fails, and he said, "If it doesn't work, we'll just stop doing it."
Sad state of affairs that something as basic as this is so refreshing and not completely normal.
That's why I mentioned exclusivity.
There should be high end private grocers. There should be plastic surgeons. These should be allowed to be privately owned
Plastic surgeons are a necessity for some, no?
Yeah, the hard part is deciding where the line is. This is why I'm a Social Democrat rather than a full libertarian or communist. The places that do socialism well (like Scandinavia) do it by using it where it's most effective and using capitalism where it's most effective. This is a never ending debate, which is absolutely needed to get this line drawn in the correct place.
Why would you not want to live in a post scarcity society? There would be no downside except you don't get to feel you are better than someone else because of the stuff you posess or the money you make. Your comment reads very much like "fuck you I got mine"
Of course I want to live in a post-scarcity society.
Unfortunately I don't live in a post-scarcity world. There are limits to everything. Energy, labor, minerals, fertilizer, economies, governments, etc. Due to abundant energy from fossil fuels we have started to believe that anything is possible and that's great, and I hope we do manage to continue via AI and automation and new technologies to get closer to post scarcity. But we aren't there today.
The other thing I don't like about post scarcity utopias like the Venus Project (and yes, I've spent a lot of time researching them), is that when it comes to governance, the current plan just seems to be old fashioned communism with a ton of handwaving about how technology will solve everything else. Communist societies of the past also had access to technology, and they didn't produce anything resembling post scarcity. As a matter of fact, if anything, they mainly produced more scarcity most of the time when compared to capitalist ones.
So for the time being I think the best we can do is to allow capitalism to do what it does best (innovation, scaling, bringing down costs), and let socialism do the things that capitalism can't handle (economic externalities like climate change, basic human needs that profit motives greatly mess up such as health care and education, solving food and housing insecurity, etc.).
Someday maybe we will get there with enough automation and some fancy resource management software, but I do very much fear the wrong people slanting those systems in their favor. Good governance and oversight will always be paramount to making any system work, and just hand waving about technology won't be enough.
You believe a great deal about capitalism that isn't true. Capitalism is very much not about bringing down cost, socialism is. Capitalism hates innovation, if capitalists have something that makes them money they'll commit bloody mass murder rather than change it, look at the oil industry, the tobacco industry, US healthcare, the whole PFAS debacle etc, etc, etc.
Ask anyone who's lived under communism and they'll tell you otherwise. I live in a formerly communist country and have thousands of people around me who can directly compare. The only people who had it better under communism are the bottom 5-10% or people who didn't want to work. If communism makes things cheaper, it's because almost everyone has so much less money. Anyone who thinks otherwise has no real experience in the matter.
That's not to say that capitalism can't go off the rails. Without proper oversight, it will descend into monopolies and fascism, as we are seeing today. But in a well functioning system that has socialist and pro worker legislation as we see many places in Europe, the best of both capitalism and socialism can be brought out. I don't know why everyone has to always try to go to one extreme or the other when the best system is always somewhere in the middle.
Communism as it has been tried was indeed flawed af. We're going to need something else if we want to survive and be much more extreme than that. Your old communism was still a money economy, with the inherent problems thereof, functioned badly with greedy and fearful people at the top.
It's always funny to me that when you tell them capitalism sucks you are a fan of 20th century East bloc regimes. No I'm not a tankie. Tankies are extremely stupid.
I fully agree we need something new. And I hope we get it. I can readily imagine better ways to tackle the problems we have.
The problem with "post scarcity" is that every time I dig into the details of what "post scarcity" government proposals are, they are basically just communism rehashed with some arm waving about "technology", so until I see some better proposals than that, I am very skeptical of anyone proposing "post scarcity" as a solution. Hence why I replied to you with my feelings about communism. To me, they are the same things in their current incarnation. Even if you take away money. There is still some central government that is doling out resources, and someone doing the production of those resources which want some compensation for their work. I don't see that changing any time soon. But maybe someday if we get true AGI and AGI robots, we can give them all the work and let them do this..
I'm sure someone will still try to slant the playing field their way like Musk is trying with Grok, though.