The hidden assumption here is that producing the goods and services required to keep a single human being alive in relative comfort (fed, sheltered, educated, healthy) necessarily requires an expenditure of manual effort roughly equivalent to what that human being can do.
Or, in other words, the assumption is that it is not and never can be the case that N people can be provided for by the effort of K people, where K < N.
And yet that assumption is obviously false: we have, here and now, the ability to feed, shelter, educate and provide health care to every single human being on the planet, and the ability to do so without the need for many of them to work for it. In the western world this has manifested in the explosion of service-oriented industries and administrative roles, which are essentially make-work jobs to give society as a whole the feeling that people are "earning their keep". Even among these affluent, supposedly highly-skilled people, probably the majority of the jobs are simply unnecessary.
What's needed is a realignment of our mentality about work: now that we have the ability to provide for everyone, we should simply do it regardless of whether everyone works or not. Will there be free riders as a result? Sure, but they're not actually a problem, and become less of one with every passing day (since the system that produces the necessary goods and services continues to grow in efficiency), and we just need to get over our fear that someone, somewhere might manage to have their needs provided for without working for it (we're already content to do this when someone inherits sufficient wealth to live without working, so this would just be an extension of that attitude: people living now and in the future will "inherit" the wealth of the past of the human species and be provided for out of it).
In any system, some folk will always squatter and some will always attempt to gain power/advantage.
Your world sounds too much like Atlas Shrugged.
The issue is getting over the mental hurdle of enabling such a society. The technology is actually pretty straightforward, but the politics of it is full of people who just can't stand the idea of that filthy leeching parasite, he doesn't work as hard as I do, why does he get anything at all! He doesn't deserve it! Which in turn is an artifact of an economic system that's already firmly in the past of many developed nations (i.e., one in which all people needed to work constantly in order to produce enough to keep themselves alive).
Of course this is a fundamentally irrational position to hold when one already lives in a society that's content to let people who never work a day in their lives have all their needs taken care of (see: inheritance). It also disregards the fact that many people who have everything literally handed to them from birth still feel a drive to try to do something meaningful with their lives. There are trust-fund parasites who don't do anything, of course, but it certainly isn't 100% of them. Plus, it's pretty well empirically established that humans do get bored and seek things to do even when they have no life-sustaining work left to perform (see: retirement).
What you think of as a mental hurdle I see as a way of discerning what is mine from what is yours. Show me a developed nation where a person actually doesn't have any personal property.
Without personal property rights, people will stop producing for others and society will fail. Why would I be willing to trade my load of firewood to you for your butchered hog? I'd just take your hog and not bother with providing you a share of firewood. And, in that system if you came around to get a share of my firewood, you'd disappear.
I believe that if a person doesn't have their needs met, they just don't deserve to have them met. (I'm not talking about a moralistic judgement here. Its more like the universe has just arranged itself in response to the unlucky person's actions.)
For example, 3 years ago, I got a hammer and a saw and started building a shed. I sold it and bought the materials to build another. I sold that one too. Today, I own a company that manufactures sheds and employs a few people.
I'm now much better off than I was because I decided to take advantage of people willing to buy my product. I now have employees who build my buildings and I profit from them, too. Is this a bad thing? I don't think so, because several of my employees were unemployed and needing work when I hired them.
What's fair about Capitalism is that anyone has the opportunity to make something work. If a person doesn't want to take advantage of this and better their lot, then I believe they have no right to bitch about us making money and having nice things. Let them suffer paycheck to paycheck.
The question is: what happens when most or all of the food and energy is being produced not by human labor, but by fully-automated processes? Why would, say, a farming robot care whether someone is "freeloading" off its labor?
What you think of as a mental hurdle I see as a way of discerning what is mine from what is yours. Show me a developed nation where a person actually doesn't have any personal property.
The idea of a post-scarcity society is not incompatible with the idea of personal property. It is incompatible with continuing to believe that basic necessities such as food, shelter, water, medicine, and possibly other things should be apportioned on a "did you earn it" basis, because that notion dates to a time when it truly was necessary for each person to put in continual effort to ensure enough of those things were produced. These things are no longer super-scarce and no longer require anywhere near the effort to produce that they used to; society should adjust in response to that change.
There is no logical reason, if the capability exists to automatically produce sufficient basic necessities for every human being, why every human being should still have to do a make-work job in order to prove they "deserve" those things. And you could still have all the capitalism you like for anything that isn't a basic necessity; the basic life doesn't have to be one of luxury, just one free from worry about things like food and shelter; the currency of such a society would need to be tied to something other than control of basic-necessity resources, but finding alternative bases for currency is something people already do for fun.
Now, add all the post-processing and transportation logistics after the food comes out of the ground to get to basic staple ingredients. Then add all the preparation activities, cooking, and packing to get to the Hot Pocket/Pop Tart level of salable food (or food-like) product.
Watersheds need to be protected; water needs to be treated, tested, stored, and pumped under pressure through a distribution network of pipes. Sewerage needs to be piped in the other direction, treated, and disposed of.
Electricity needs space, energy input, capital, and opex and a distribution network that needs on-going maintenance and repair. Gas lines need a lot of the same. Internet distribution needs...
Medicine needs space, energy, [lots of] people with specialized training just to apply the state of today's art. It also has a large research and development component responsible for ensuring that we aren't still using leeches to treat "Bilious fever".
The obvious rebuttal is that someone has to build and maintain the farming robot, so this is the guy whom you would be freeloading of.
On a more general note: The concept of property only ever arises because of scarcity. For example, you wouldn't describe yourself as owning the air in your apartment, since there is ample air. A diver, on the other hand, would definitely declare ownership in the air in your air bottle.
So how can we implement a post-scarcity society? My best guess would be to work on affordable technology that makes basic things like water, food, clothes or internet access not scarce anymore.
The other problem is what constitutes basic necessity. I can build you a "human terrarium" of 100 sq ft, HVAC, clean water, disposal, and 4 bottles Soylent per day - leaving you 18 hours daily to procreate & demand more. What is the limit to your demands? You have ample opportunity & resources to earn your own survival with ease; now you demand I provide your total basic survival needs from my own efforts, taking what I would give my own offspring - ENOUGH! BEGONE!
Well, let the people who live on welfare invent and create the machines that will give them free food, water, heat and living space. They surely have a lot of time to devote to that, not having to work for a living.
When was communism actually implemented, that it didn't "work out too well" in your opinion?
The problem is that pesky human nature gets in the way.
What is awesome is a system where everyone benefits when everyone is self-interested.
In power structures, things are great if you're part of the class that receives political favors and not so great if you're not.
In capitalist societies, capital owning classes have the time and resources to be the political class. In previous communist societies, party and administrative members were the political class.
This sounds like theory. In practice, capitalism beats communism in pretty much every way. Of course there are people that own capital. Private ownership is one of the main tenets of capitalism.
Capitalism works because it is on the correct side of human nature. It pushes people to earn more capital, which in turn, helps the rest of us.
Do you think our technology would have advanced this far if we didn't have capitalism? The only reason computers, phones, the Internet are getting better and better is because of competition. The more competition in a market, the cheaper the price is to us, the consumer.
Communism, on the other hand, makes everyone a slave to the state. Why would you want to compete and earn more when it will just be taken away from you by the government?
There were many experiments in the 1970s with communism. People created their own small communities and shared everything. Everyone was equal. The end result was always a disaster: jealousy always fueled the collapse of the group.
Would you want the person in school that never studied for his tests and partied every day to earn the same amount as you, who studied for every test and did well? I sure wouldn't.
Communism, in any form, is a failure. I don't know how much death, poverty, and famine we need to go through for some people to learn this.
A system where everybody was equal was never tried.
A system where the necessities were guaranteed was tried - in the Soviet Union - and it was, by and large, very successful.
It was successful enough, in fact, that Western elites responded to it in the 50s by implementing similar guarantees - NHS, social security, medicare, etc. (McCarthy's witchhunts and the Vietnam war weren't the only responses to communism).
What made the Soviet Union finally unable to keep up economically was the prohibitive cost of the arms race and declining oil export revenues, not the lack of capitalist profit motives.
The NHS actually shows the power of democracy over an elite - after all the 1945 election removed Churchill and voted in the socialist Attlee government. Attlee was so effective as a leader that even Thatcher spoke highly of him:
'Quite contrary to the general tendency of politicians in the Nineties, he was all substance and no show.'
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1194059/A-giant-ma...
Do you think the fact that the UK NHS funding model closely followed the existing Soviet NHS model was a coincidence?
The Tories fought long and hard in the 40s to make the proposed new 'cover everybody' system insurance based (something like Obamacare I guess) and ultimately didn't prevail. They used all sorts of scare tactics that would seem very familiar today.
A large part of that failure was Labour being able to point to the Soviet Union (not yet enemies of the highest order) and go "look, we can achieve the same success in curing infectious disease that they did".
Welfare programs do not even begin to touch on who owns the means of production.
Communism implies a stateless society after a period of power by labor that is devoid of private ownership of the means of production. Supposedly, this transitionary period should do away with class. According to theory, once class is no longer a factor, the state is no longer needed.
Welfare programs, again, do not touch on this at all.
You've read too much Ayn Rand.
A key point you miss: wealth is perishable. Food rots. Weeds grow. Machines rust. Buildings crumble. Durable money is inedible, useful only when exchanged for something perishable.
You really need to read Atlas Shrugged. Comes a point when us producers get sick of you looters, and drop out of society. I'm already feeling enormous strain from my 30-50% tax bracket (most going to a welfare system you want), and debate switching lifestyle to the self sufficient farming I was raised on and which your utopia would receive 0% of.
Having access to temporary credit means that same problem, but next month.
My late rent fee is $30.
My late utility fee is $5, but if I paid by a bounced check, that would be $35. In other cities, it could be much higher.
The fee for not paying a fine on time can be a weekend stint in jail, whereby you will get charged for room and board.
The fee for not being able to pay for car repairs is losing your job.
The fee for not paying for needed medical attention when you aren't on insurance (Which, despite obamacare, many poor people lack) can be crippling.
Poor people, in aggregate, aren't stupid - they wouldn't use payday loans if the alternatives weren't worse. Yes, it shifts the problem a month out, and puts you in debt for ~$100 dollars. So would juggling your missed payments (Meanwhile, giving you a black mark against your landlord).
That's still better then having the problem today. And who knows? Next month, you may be a millionaire. Or dead. Better worry about that next month.
If you want to kill payday loans, the best way to do that is by giving everyone a living wage/income.
looks at this in complete puzzlement
I'm constantly amazed at just how broken the US system is in almost every possible way.
And just for the record, there is no such thing as payday loans in Europe. At the very least not in Germany. The first time I heard of these was when John Oliver did a segment on them.
A payday loan might have an atrocious interest rate, but it's better than getting kicked out of your apartment because you're $30 short on rent or getting thrown in jail for a parking ticket.
second, receiving mail was listed as a problem. how to get people their mail for important papers?
third, allocating land for farming their own food. why should they have to take part in the rest of our food economy if they can't fork over $1.25 for an apple? Just let them tend trees with their time.
fourth: transportation. often you have to get someplace. how can we design public transportation so it gets the poorest where they need to go reliably?